Keeping It Kosher

The Jews, ancient and modern, have always understood the science of eugenics,
and have governed themselves in accordance with it; hence the preservation of the Jewish race. Stanton Coit, 1916
You will never be able

to live here in peace, because you left here black, and came back white
Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, (1952)
The Mosaic Code and Eugenics.
How would you define eugenics? was our representatives first question.
It is the study, Sir Francis replied, of the conditions under human control which improve or impair the inborn
characteristics of the race.
On ethnic cleansing;
the semitic as the indigenous of the white race.
keeping it kosher
eugenics and racial hygiene.

the jewish body politic and playing god.
on Meira Weiss and the chosen body, jewish self-hatred,
aryanization & the final solution.
curated by
amma birago
I do not know the origin of this name [Jews], but it is applied to

all men, even foreigners, who follow their customs.
Dio Cassius
Needless to say, this ability to create truth out of thin air is a major component
of Jewish power in the West today. The timeline of Jewish eugenics provided here demonstrates beyond doubt that
Jews were welcome, active participants in the eugenics movement and that Jews even today are still in the vanguard
of a eugenic worldview, a fact entirely unknown to most people. (pgs. 71-72)
Review of John Glads Jewish Eugenics
by Kevin MacDonald
There is no better argument for the universal practice of eugenics
than the marvelous success of the Jewish race. Thurman Rice, 1929
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Anglo-Jewish Scientists
Todd M. Endelman
In Western and Central Europe, the bestowal of citizenship was predicated on the assumption that Jews no longer
constituted a distinct nation, that they were a religious community whose members differed from their fellow
citizens only in terms of their beliefs and manner of worship. The problem was that this formula was a patently
false description of the realities of Jewish life everywhere in the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Salaman was bold enough to say so. He realized that what bound Anglo-Jews together was more complex than
religion. In the face of growing indifference to religious observance, it was hard to define the community as
primarily religious in nature. The appeal of the language of race, with its emphasis on biological descent, shared
sentiments, and family ties, was that it better described what bound Jews to each other than the language of religion.
It took notice of feelings of commonality and belonging that liberal integrationist ideology refused to acknowledge
and recognized that emancipation failed to dissolve the social and emotional ties of Jewishness. The widespread,
casual, everyday use of racial language by British Jews before the rise of Nazism shows how inadequate the
integrationist view of Jewishness was. Salaman, however, unlike other Anglo-Jewish scientists, was too invested in
genetics to forswear completely the language of racial descent even after Nazism demonstrated its potential for
deadly abuse. While he modified his views and no longer trumpeted them in community forums, he never
abandoned his belief in a biological component to Jewishness.
IVAN G. MARCUS From Politics to Martyrdom
Shifting Paradigms in the Hebrew Narratives of the 1096 Crusade Riots
In the spring of 1096, in response to Pope Urban II's appeal for an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem, mobs of French
and local German Christians attacked Rhineland Jewish communities in Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Trier and
elsewhere. Both in the Hebrew and Latin narrative accounts, the most striking aspect of these events was less the
gruesome slaughter and pillage by the Crusaders than the extraordi nary way Jews killed their own families and then
themselves in order to avoid baptism. Shocked almost beyond words, the twelfth-century German Churchman,
Albert of Aix (Aachen) reported: The Jews, seeing that their Christian enemies were attacking them and their
children, and that they were sparing no age, likewise fell upon one another, brother, children, wives, and sisters, and
thus they perished at each other's hands. Horrible to say, mothers cut the throats of nursing children with knives and
stabbed others, preferring them to perish thus by their own hands rather than to be killed by the weapons of the
uncircumcised.
Israels Uncomfortable History of Racist Engineering
Believers in Eugenics Helped Birth Jewish State
Seth J. Frantzman
A little noticed 2011 book by academic Etan Bloom revealed that the father of Israeli sociology and a leading
Zionist of the British Mandate named Arthur Ruppin, was a believer in eugenics. In 1919 he argued that the Jewish
race should be purified and that it was desirable that only the racially pure come to the land. As head of the
Palestine Office of the Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency for Israel), he put his purity schemes into
practice, arguing that Ethiopian Jews should not be permitted to immigrate, because they have no blood
connection, and arguing that Yemenite Jews should be brought only for menial labor.
Henry Friedlander
From Euthanasia to the Final Solution
British naturalist and mathematician Francis Galton and described by the leading American eugenicist, Charles B.
Davenport, as "the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding." Its members were scientists
from the biological and social sciences, or what today may be called the life sciences. The eugenics movement was
international; it was particularly influential in the United States, which served as a model for eugenicists in Germany
and other countries.
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Eugenicists attacked the problem of how to improve the gene pool on two fronts. One was "positive" eugenics, and
attempt to increase the numbers of the desirable population. This was an effort to persuade those judged to have the
best pedigree to marry each other and to bear a large number of children; this approach was later applied in fascist
countries, where medals and benefits were offered to the mothers of many children. But positive eugenics was never
very successful, since the wealthier classes simply did not have enough children.
The second front was "negative" eugenics. This was an effort to prevent the undesirable masses to increase in
numbers. The eugenicists viewed the lower classes as a danger to the purity of the race.
After the Nazi assumption of power, when the eugenic society embraced racial antisemitism and expelled Jewish
members, race hygiene was the only term used, and thereafter it became the appropriate term to designate eugenics
in Germany. Racial antisemitism had played no role in the early years of German eugenics, but this changed during
the Weimar Republic. Already in 1924 von Verschuer told students that "the German, vlkisch struggle is primarily
directed against the Jews, because alien Jewish penetration is a special threat to the German race."
Seth J. Frantzman
Ruppin and his fellow travelers were able to influence the Zionist movement, tragically in retrospect, to view nonEuropeans as a different caste and to back up their arguments with outdated theories of eugenists. For instance,
Chaim Sheba, who became director general of the Health Ministry in 1950, argued, according to a 2005 report that
a high concentration of those ill in body and soul would jeopardize the future of Jewish community in Israel. To
support his argument, he used examples from genetic theories which purported to show national gene pools
weakened through a lack of genetic vigilance. Sheba was influential in temporarily preventing Cochin Jews from
immigrating. The communist newspaper Davar asserted that a community with numerous sick, decadent,
unrestrained elements will not withstand the social and security test. Haaretz writer Arieh Gledblum claimed in
1950 that North African Jews primitivism is unsurpassed. They have little talent for comprehending anything
intellectual and lack any roots in Judaism.
Since the 1950s, this legacy of ethnocentrism has haunted Israel. When the philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Israel
in 1961, she described her fear of Jews who looked Arab but spoke Hebrew, calling them an Oriental mob.
Seth J. Frantzman is the opinion editor of the Jerusalem Post.
Anglo-Jewish Scientists
Todd M. Endelman
With mounting instances of intermarriage before him, it is not surprising that Salaman, already knee-deep in genetic
research, made the leap from studying hybrid potatoes to hybrid Jews. What was absent from the mix of factors
propelling Salaman in this direction was antisemitism. In Defenders of the Race, John Efron cast Jewish race science
texts as intellectual resistance to prejudice, as a strategy challenging the hegemonic discourse of European
anthropology and an attempt at reversing the European gaze. For Efron, the denigration of Jews in the human
sciences was the catalyst, if not the cause, of their interest in race research. This explains, in his view, why he
found no examples of Jewish race scientists in France: Jews were more secure in France than in Germany and
Austria and not the chief object of French racial thinking (colonial peoples were) - thus there was no irritant to
stimulate a Jewish response.37 This line of argument, however, cannot account for Salamans emergence as a race
scientist. Like French racial thinking, British racial thinking was not obsessed with Jews - in addition to which,
Salaman himself seems to have experienced little antisemitism in his professional and personal life. While it
was not absent at St. Pauls, it was neither pervasive nor especially malevolent.
I do not mean to suggest that he was blind to or unalarmed by its increasing volubility. But there is nothing to
indicate that it was decisive in shaping his outlook. Far more influential were Mendelian genetics and the
assumption, widely held in Anglo-Jewry, that race, as well as religion, was central to defining Jewishness.
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Anglo-Jewish audiences were introduced to scientific accounts of the racial origins and health of the Jews in the
years just before World War I. Salaman delivered his first public lecture on Jewish heredity in November 1910 - to
the Union of Jewish Literary Societies, of which he was president.39 His ideas reached a larger audience the
following year when, following the publication of his Journal of Genetics article, the Jewish Chronicle featured an
interview with him under the title Mendelism and the Jew.40 Several months earlier, London hosted an
international conference on race relations and the promotion of world peace that attracted Jewish interest. The
Universal Races Congress, which met at the Imperial Institute from July 26 to 29, 1911, was a liberal, not a
conservative, initiative, promoted by figures like Felix Adler, leader of the Ethical Culture movement in the United
States.
Its organizers believed that the races of the world were equals who could profit and learn from each others
experiences. Prior to the Congress, on May 11, its organizers met in the home of the Liberal member of Parliament
and banker Stuart Samuel, brother of Herbert Samuel, with a group of Jews who wished to be represented at the
event. Salaman would have attended the meeting but he was traveling in the United States and Canada at the time,
attending to business matters and meeting on racial topics with American researchers - Maurice Fishberg, Franz
Boas, and Joseph Jacobs, who had left London for New York in 1900 to work on the Jewish Encyclopaedia.
Ralph W. Klein. Anti-Semitism as Christian Legacy
The Origin and Nature of our Estrangement from the Jews.
Anti-Semitism is Christianity's most disturbing legacy to the Western world. That judgment suggests the depth of
our estrangement and of our guilt, and it underscores the high priority of all efforts that enable Christians and Jews
to live together in love.
In an attempt to make Jews guilty for their own persecution, some people point to the hostility toward Jews in
Hellenistic and Roman times and allege that later anti-Semitism merely continues this attitude. The causes for the
ancient antipathy are multiple. Some hostile treatment arose because of political manipulation by insecure potentates
who tried to gain the loyalty and gratitude of some of their subjects by depriving the Jews of privileges, encouraging
agitation against them, or legitimating the taking of their property. In part, hostility toward the Jews in antiquity was
also reciprocation for Jewish contempt for heathenism.
Anti Jewish polemic or calumny could be intense in ancient times. Apion (1 st century C.E.) claimed that Antiochus
had found a golden head of an ass in the Holy of Holies, and he accused the Jews of cannibalistic rites. Manetho, an
Egyptian historian from the third century B.C.E. and Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman historian, born in the first century
C.E., recount a scurrilous account of the Exodus: Pharaoh allegedly drove the Jews from Egypt because they had
leprosy and other diseases which made them impure.
It needs to be kept in mind that the first Jews Romans encountered were slaves, beggars, and street sellers, and the
usual disdain for a poor minority by a more well to-do majority played a role. Moreover, this ancient anti-Semitism
was at most a marginal item in society. Often Jews lived quite at peace. The two things that most irritated the
Romans were Jewish monotheism and the resultant exclusivism, on the one hand, and Jewish rebellion against the
harsh Roman rule.
Ancient hatred toward the Jews, therefore, offers little or nothing to ex-plain the later hostility to the Jews among
Christians, nor, of course, does it justify such hostility (for a full treatment, see Gager [1983]).
The Middle Ages
Many theologians during the Middle Ages believed the Jews forfeited their right to the promise because of their
guilt in the death of Jesus, The destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. and the dispersions of the Jews were interpreted
as punishment for this guilt.
The Crusades, for example, called to liberate the Holy Land from the hand of Muslim infidels, led to untold violence
on the Jews of Europe. Why go to Palestine to fight infidels, many asked, when the enemies of Christ and the
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synagogue of Satan are right in our midst? 1096 C.E., the beginning of the first crusade, is a landmark in the history
of anti-Semitism, separating a period of strong prejudice but with rare outbursts of violence from another in which
violence became a much more frequent occurrence.
Ralph W. Klein. Anti-Semitism as Christian Legacy:
The Origin and Nature of our Estrangement from the Jews
Because Jews were banned from landowning and from most of the trade guilds they were forced more and more into
money lending. The church, mean-while, forbade the taking of interest since money lending was thought to be
charity extended to the poor rather than a way of generating new wealth. The church made no exception for the Jews
in this respect, but the princes protected Jewish usurers in order to finance their own operations. Popular thought
seems to have tolerated Jewish taking of interest either because the Bible permitted taking interest from a "stranger,"
or because the Jews were considered damned already so that it made no difference if they committed additional sins.
The Jews were forced into money lending and were then hated for it. It led to a classical stereotype of the Jew: a
miserly old man, with a hooked nose and greedy claws, avidly grasping his money bags. As late as 1966, Charles Y.
Glock and Rodney Stark concluded, "Perhaps the most constant theme in anti-Semitism from medieval times down
to the present is of the Jew as a cheap, miserly manipulator of money, forever preoccupied with materialism, and
consequently possessing virtually unlimited economic power" (1966:109). As economic tools of the princes, the
Jews often exacted from the people the money needed for his activities and were hated for it. Not a few Jews were
killed or expelled by princes and barons in order to cancel their debts to them (Morais, 1976:111). Jews were in fact
expelled from many countries during the Middle Ages: from England in 1290; from France in 1306 and 1394; from
Spain and Portugal in 1492-1497. This latter explusion, numbering more than 100,000 has kept the Iberian peninsula
devoid of Jews until the present day. The basis for all these expulsions from Christian lands was hatred of the Jews,
often compounded with economic motives and nationalistic tendencies. The Jews were driven from the countries
along the Atlantic coast of Europe, just when these countries were becoming leaders in world trade. The expulsions
rearranged the Jewish population of Europe and left an indelible mark upon Jewish thinking.
While the word ghetto arose in the sixteenth century, the actual practice of segregation is known much earlier and
can be traced to the Third Lateran Council of 1179, which prohibited Jews and Christians from living together.
Ghettoization was often accompanied by the wearing of badges, compulsory attendance at conversionary sermons,
restrictions on professions, and other humiliations. The ghettos were crowded and unsanitary.
It took the disappointment of World War I, the chaos of the Weimar Republic, and the monomania of Adolf Hitler to
translate racial theory into the "final solution," the annihilation of six million Jews in the Holocaust. As Katz
remarks, "The basic principle of anti-Semitism, the denial of Jews of the right to exist, came here to a wholly
unexpected, but not inconsistent, fruition as the policy of a government" (1980:317).
Economic factors arose in the Middle Ages, when Jews participated in banking and usury, and also after
emancipation, when Jews were leaders in many of the economic changes of the nineteenth century. Politics figured
prominently in Bismarck's use of anti-Semitism to grasp for power and in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, which reported an international Jewish conspiracy aimed at world domination, the overthrow of Christendom,
and the establishment of the devil's reign on earth. But we need to be very clear: While there are racial, cultural,
political, economic, and sociological causes for anti-Semitism, "Christian" attitudes, feelings, words, and actions to
and about Jews were always at the center of the problem or provided a climate in which such anti Judaism could
flourish. It needs to be stated with emphasis that all anti-Semitism is also anti-Christian. No one who has penetrated
the meaning of the Gospel to any extent at all can discover in it the slightest justification for the tragedy of the last
2,000 years of anti-Semitism. Of course, many of those who believed in or practiced anti-Semitism were nonChristians or even anti-Christian.
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A Life (Un)Worthy of Living:

Reproductive Genetics in Israel and Germany
Yael Hashiloni-Dolev
History: Although the Jewish state is often justified in popular Jewish discourse as a consequence of the
Holocaust, the prominent Israeli geneticist Rafael Falk describes the entire history of Zionism as a eugenicist
project. Hashiloni-Dolev comments: Israeli counselors have a double eugenic memory of both the atrocities of the
Nazis and the Zionist soft eugenic history. The not criticized Zionist-Jewish soft eugenic history is alive and
well, although it is also never explicitly connected to todays practices. Israelis are not burdened by the accusation
of anti-Semitism and images of the Holocaust which have become the lingua franca of post-war West German
political culture and which are used by both leftists and conservatives as a sledgehammer technique in political
disputes.
Yael Hashiloni-Dolev, Between mothers, fetuses and society:
Reproductive genetics In the Israeli-Jewish context
I have argued elsewhere that it is not only fetuses that are seen first and foremost as a part of their mothers, and thus
as subordinate to them; similarly, children in Israeli-Jewish society are not perceived as autonomous human beings
bearing individual rights, or as gifts that should be accepted as is, but rather as parts of their families. It follows
that the selection of future children in keeping with their familys interests (especially the wish not to be burdened
with extra care), as well as the right to have a healthy child, are not morally condemned, but are even positively
counseled and seen as fully congruent with responsible parenthood. This stands in sharp contrast to a Habermasian
understanding,60 which forbids parents to become the designers of their children; to do so, in this view, would be to
transgress the legitimate borders between children and their parents and to deprive children of the potential for the
fully ethical existence of their (autonomous) self.
Jewish eugenics pre-dates Hitler's Master Race
According to the Israeli daily newspaper quoted below, before the Nazi Third Reich in Germany plotted to create a
Master Race from the European gene pool, Zionists had already established a racial purification program to create
the perfect Jewish bloodline.
A shocking new study reveals how key figures in the pre-state Zionist establishment proposed castrating the
mentally ill, sterilizing the poor and doing everything possible to ensure reproduction only among the `best of
people.'
Castrating the mentally ill, encouraging reproduction among families "numbered among the intelligentsia" and
limiting the size of "families of Eastern origin" and "preventing ... lives that are lacking in purpose" - these proposals
are not from some program of the Third Reich but rather were brought up by key figures in the Zionist establishment
of the Land of Israel during the period of the British Mandate.
Reproductive genetics In the Israeli-Jewish context.
Dor Yeshorim (An Upright Generation), The purpose of the program is to prevent two heterozygotes from
mating, thus averting the birth of a disabled baby prior to conception. Screening is strictly anonymous, and results
are provided to the match-making organization. If both potential partners are found to be carriers of the same
abnormal allele, any steps towards an engagement are halted. Rather, moral thinking concerning eugenics should
also be understood in relation to general Jewish attitudes toward the manipulation of life itself by modern science
and technology, as well as to ideas concerning the prevention of suffering. However, that is not how it was seen in
Israel, and even today studies are being carried out on the Jewish Genome.
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Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.

Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin
It was not, of course, always used that way. Symptomatic perhaps of this shift is the following statement from Dio
Cassius: "I do not know the origin of this name [Jews], but it is applied to all men, even foreigners, who follow their
customs.
Diaspora is not the forced product of war and destruction-taking place after the down-fall of Judea - but that
already in the centuries before this downfall, the majority of Jews lived voluntarily outside of the Land. Moreover,
given a choice between domination by a "foreign" power who would allow them to keep the Torah undisturbed and
domination by a "Jewish" authority who would interfere with religious life, the Pharisees and their successors the
Rabbis generally chose the former.
The story we would tell of Jewish history has three stages. In the first stage, we find a people - call it a tribe - not
very different in certain respects from peoples in similar material conditions all over the world, a people like most
others that regards itself as special among humanity, indeed as the People, and its land as preeminently wonderful
among lands, the Land. This is, of course, an oversimplification because this "tribe" never quite dwelled alone and
never regarded itself as autochthonous in its Land.
Kevin MacDonald
The upshot of the situation is that a group of largely Jewish activists have so successfully undermined the very
eugenic mechanism that made Jewry what it is as to pose an existential threat to Jewry. But Jewish common sense
has not only continued to hold sway in the practice of eugenics, it has even managed to surf the scientific tide of
newly found genetic knowledge - all the while paying lip service to the Holocaust-from-eugenics gospel. (p. 72)
The movement against eugenics was part of a much larger picture for Jewish activists: In 1975, the UN General
Assembly declared that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination, essentially declaring the state of
Israel to be illegitimate. As a counterbalance, Jewish groups massively funded the Holocaust Memorial
Movement. In it turn, the Holocaust Memorial Movement attacked the eugenics movement with every increasing
fury.
Eugenics is alive and well in Israel, although the word eugenic is typically avoided. Glad cites an expert
suggesting that the first human clones will probably be in Israel; this will occur with the support of Orthodox
Jews. Yael Hashioni-Dolev shows that Israeli geneticists and the Israeli public strongly favor eugenic
practices. Israeli women are heavily pressured to engage in selection of their embryos, or, in the ultra-Orthodox
community, to marry according to genetic compatibility. This can be seen as an aspect of racial Zionism that
dominates contemporary Israeli political culture.
Eugenics and the Development of Nazi Race Policy

Jerry BERGMAN
The German eugenists relied heavily upon the work done in Britain and America. Franz Bumm, the President of the
Reich Health Office, "noted that the value of eugenics research had been convincingly demonstrated in the United
States, where anthropological statistics had been gathered from two million men recruited for the American Armed
Forces" (Proctor 1988, 40). The various institutes began to research the persistence of various "primitive racial
traits" in various races in and outside of Germany. They found much evidence of "Cro magnon racial type in certain
populations, and presumably also Neanderthal." Like the American and British counterparts, the German Racial
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Hygiene Institutes and the professors at various universities began to discover genetic evidence for virtually every
malady of humankind from criminality to hernias, and even divorce, with researchers adding a few original
problems of their own, such as "loving to sail on water." They saw their work as a noble effort to continue "Darwin's
attempts to elucidate the origin of species" (Proctor 1988, 291).
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Greek theories on eugenics
Sir Professor David Galton has written an interesting article on the Greek theories on eugenics, reviewing the works
of Plato and Aristotle.' Some more aspects would probably be worthwhile mentioning:
1. Plato's suggestions were not limited to healthy persons reproducing but in preventing the sick and malformed
citizens bearing children as well. Such offspring would most probably be as wretched as their parents2 and should
not be reared.'
2. Beyond infanticide of the unwanted progeny, Plato's suggestions included abortion' and transmission to the "other
city". The latter proposal has led scholars to deny that infanticide was really meant by Plato and probably this
passage and not the mentioned one from Herodotus' led the late Professor Francis Galton to make the comment
about the formation of colonies.
3. Morbid genetic material would not only have been undesired by the state but would inhibit individual evolution as
well" providing a bad quality of life. Although it sounds strange for current ethics, Plato seemed somehow to act for
the "patient's best interests".
As Greeks based virtue equally on physical, mental and social wellbeing, they were reluctant to separate the good
from the beautiful and individual value from submission to the community. Therefore, they would seemingly
accept, more or less, the idea of eugenic manipulation. However, there was not any kind of consensus and as
Professor David Galton emphasises, even in Plato's works there seems to be a differentiation from The Republic to
Laws. Greek theories are really valuable when exploring analogous contemporary ethical problems, but even Plato
himself would not equate the "philosopher king" with the chairman of a twentieth century eugenics board.'
Eugenics and the Development of Nazi Race Policy.

Jerry Bergman
A central government policy of the Hitler administration was the breeding of a "superior race." This required, at the
very least, preventing the "inferior races" from mixing with "superior" ones in order to reduce contamination of the
latter's gene pool. The "superior race" belief is based on the theory of group inequality within each species, a major
presumption and requirement of Darwin's original "survival of the fittest" theory. A review of the writings of Hitler
and contemporary German biologists finds that Darwin's theory and writings had a major influence upon Nazi
policies. Hitler believed that the human gene pool could be improved by selective breeding, using the same
techniques that farmers used to breed a superior strain of cattle. In the formulation of his racial policies, he relied
heavily upon the Darwinian evolution model, especially the elaborations by Spencer and Haeckel. They culminated
in the "final solution," the extermination of approximately six million Jews and four million other people who
belonged to what German scientists judged were "inferior races."
The concept that "all men are created equal" and the egalitarian ideal which has dominated American ideology for
the past thirty years, and to a lesser degree since the founding of our country, has not been universal among nations
and cultures (Tobach et al. 1974). The Germans' belief that they were a superior race had many sources, a major one
being the social Darwinian eugenics movement, especially its crude survival of the fittest world view (Stein 1988,
Clark 1953). As Lappe noted: Although the idea of improving the hereditary quality of the race is at least as old as
Plato's Republic, modern eugenics thought arose only in the nineteenth century. The emergence of interest in
eugenics during that century had multiple roots. The most important was the theory of evolution, for Francis
Galton's ideas on eugenics--and it was he who created the term "eugenics"--were a direct logical outgrowth of the
scientific doctrine elaborated by his cousin, Charles Darwin (1978, 457).

Eugenics' all important impact on Nazi policy can be evaluated accurately by an examination of the extant
documents, writings, and artifacts produced by Germany's twentieth century Nazi movement. Historical documents
show that Nazi governmental policy was openly influenced by evolution, the zeitgeist of both science and educated
society of the time (Stein 1988, Haller 1971, Keith 1946, 230). The Nazi treatment of Jews and the other "races" that
their science concluded were "inferior" was largely a result of their belief that the source of biological evolution was
a set of proven techniques available to scientists to significantly improve humankind. As Tenenbaum noted:
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the political philosophy of the... German State, was built on the ideas of struggle, selection, and survival of the
fittest, all notions and observations arrived at... by Darwin... but already in luxuriant bud in the German social
philosophy of the nineteenth century.... Thus developed the doctrine of Germany's inherent right to rule the world on
the basis of superior strength... of a "hammer and anvil" relationship between the Reich and the weaker nations
(1956, 211).
Implementation of Nazi Race Theories
The means of evolution are drawn primarily from the process of mutations, which are then selected by natural
selection. Favored individuals will be more likely to survive and increase in number, forming new races while the
"weaker" ones will die off. This process, once called raciation but labeled speciation today, is the source of
evolution which, in theory, continues forever. If every member of a species were fully equal, there would be nothing
to select from, and evolution for that species would stop. Evolution is based on the acquiring of unique traits,
whether through mutations or other means, that enable those possessing them to better survive adverse conditions
than those who don't.
According to evolution theory, some people (even if it is only one person) will inherit a mutation which will be
passed on and which will enable them to survive at a higher rate than those without that trait. These differences will
always gradually produce new races, some of which have an advantage in terms of survival. These are the superior,
i.e., the more evolved, races. When that trait eventually spreads throughout the entire race, because of the survival
advantage it confers on those endowed with it, a new and "higher level" of animal will exist. Hitler and the Nazi
party claimed that they were trying to apply this accepted science to society. And "the core idea of Darwinism is not
evolution, but selection. Evolution... describes the results of selection" (Stein 1988, 53). Hitler stressed that "we [the
Nazis] must understand, and cooperate with science":
In 1937, while Mengele was still in residence [for his M. D. degree], Otmar von Verschuer published an article in
which he said, "Hitler is the first statesman who has come to recognize hereditary biological and race hygiene and
make it a leading principle of statesmanship." Two years later von Verschuer announced: "We specialists of race
hygiene are happy to have witnessed that the work normally associated with the scientific laboratories or the
academic study room has extended into the life of our people" (Astor 1985, 23).
Darwin's evolutionary ideas were exported into Germany almost immediately. The first language into which his
writings were translated--only a year after The Origin of Species was published--was German. Darwinian evolution
was not only championed in Germany more than most other countries, but it was more influential on German state
policy. Gasman (1971, xiii) concluded that [i]n no other country... did the ideas of Darwinism develop as... the total
explanation of the world as [it did] in Germany... [or insist] on the literal transfer of the laws of biology [as
interpreted by evolution] to the social realm.
This path was started at the 1863 Congress of German Naturalists. At this meeting, one of evolutions' leading
proponents and writers, Ernest Haeckel, "a respected professor of zoology" at the University of Jena, first forcefully
presented the views which commenced his four decade long role as "Darwin's chief apostle" (Stein 1988, 54). He
was especially active in spreading "social Darwinism,"--the application of Darwinian theory to society in order to
explain the historical and social development of civilizations, specifically why some were advanced and others
remained primitive. But, as Gould (1977, 77-78) concluded,
... Haeckel's greatest influence was, ultimately, in another, tragic direction--national socialism [Nazism]. His
evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to... his belief that
harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the
right to dominate others.... His brave words about objective science--all contributed to the rise of Nazism. The
Monist League that he had founded and led... made a comfortable transition to active support for Hitler.
Aside from Haeckel, the person most influential in helping the spread of Darwin's ideas in Germany was Houston
Chamberlain, the son of a British Admiral and a German mother. In 1899 he published The Foundations of the 19th
Century, which concluded that Darwinism had proved that the Germans were superior to all other races (Weindling
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1989). Germans were the "foundation" of our society because they produced the industrial world. Chamberlain
quoted extensively from Darwin, noting that the latter stressed that a major difference between apes and humans was
brain size. The brain, he stressed, is of far more importance than any other body structure in measuring human
evolution progress. The larger the brain capacity, it was then believed, the higher the intelligence. Chamberlain also
was interested in phrenology, the now discredited science of determining personality traits by examining and
measuring the shape and size of the bumps on one's skull (Jacquerd 1984). Certain traits, the phrenologists reasoned,
were located in specific parts of the brain, and if one had developed some trait to an exceptional degree, a "bump"
would exist in the appropriate place. Lastly, they concluded that the configuration of the brain and other physical
traits can be used to distinguish not only humans from monkeys, but also to rank the races. This idea received wide
support from
... the German academic and scientific communities... who helped prepare the way for national socialist
biopolicies.... Beginning in the 1890s with the work of Otto Ammon on cephalic indexes and other such scientific
proof of Aryan superiority, much German anthropology, especially the most scientific branch, physical
anthropology... [concluded that] If humankind evolved through natural selection... then it was obvious that the races
of humankind must be arranged hierarchically along the ladder of evolution.... there is little doubt that the
anthropologists who discovered all the measurable divergent physical, psychological, and mental characteristics of
the various races thought they were scientific. And so did the general public (Stein 1988, 57).
The inequality doctrine, although an integral part of German philosophy for years, reached its apex under the Hitler
regime, and obtained its chief intellectual support from established science (Weiss 1988, Aycoberry 1981). Ernst
Haeckel taught that "the morphological differences between two generally recognized species--for example sheep
and goats--are much less important than those... between a Hottentot and a man of the Teutonic race" (1876, 434).
And that the Germans have evolved the "furthest from the common form of apelike men [and outstripped]... all
others in the career of civilization" and will be the race to bring humankind up to a "new period of higher mental
development" (1876, 332). This was true, not only mentally but physically, because evolution achieves "symmetry
of all parts, and equal development which we call the type of perfect human beauty" (1876, 321).
The inequality doctrine, although an integral part of German philosophy for years,
reached its apex under the Hitler regime,
and obtained its chief intellectual support from established science.
The lesser races were both inferior and worth less: "woolly-haired" peoples, he concluded, are "incapable of a true
inner culture or of a higher mental development... no woolly-haired nation has ever had an important history" (1876,
10). Haeckel even argued that, since "the lower races--such as the Veddahs or Australian Negroes--are
psychologically nearer to the mammals--apes and dogs--than to the civilized European, we must, therefore, assign a
totally different value to their lives" (1905, 390). And Stein notes that this was not a minority or an extreme view:
"Haeckel was the respected scientist; the views of his followers were often more extreme" (Stein 1988, 56).
As a race above all others, the Aryans believed that their evolutionary superiority gave them not only the right, but
the duty, to subjugate all others. And race was no minor plank of the Nazi philosophy: Tenenbaum (1956,211-212)
concluded that they incorporated the... theory of evolution in their political system, with nothing left out.... Their
political dictionary was replete with words like... struggle, selection, and extinction (Ausmerzen). The syllogism of
their logic was clearly stated: The world is a jungle in which different nations struggle for space. The stronger win,
the weaker die or are killed. In the 1933 Nuremberg party rally, Hitler proclaimed that "higher race subjects to itself

a lower race... a right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right because [it
was] founded on reason [of evolution]" (Quoted from The Nuremberg Trials, Vol. 14, pg. 279).
The Nazis believed that they must "direct evolution" to advance
the human race by isolating the "inferior races" to prevent them from
further contaminating the "Aryan" gene pool.
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The Nazis believed that, instead of permitting natural forces and chance to produce what it may, they must "direct
evolution" to advance the human race. To achieve this, their first step was to isolate the "inferior races" to prevent
them from further contaminating the "Aryan" gene pool (Poliakov 1974). The widespread public support for this
policy was a result of the common belief of the educated classes that it was scientifically proven that certain races
were genetically inferior. The government was simply applying, as part of their plan for a better society, what they
believed was proven science to produce a superior race of humans: "The business of the corporate state was
eugenics or artificial selection--politics applied to biology" (Stein 1988, 56). In Hitler's writings, humankind were
biological "animals" to whom the genetics learned from livestock breeding could be applied. As early as 1925, in
Chapter 4 of Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined his view that science, specifically the Darwinian natural selection struggle,
was the only basis for a successful German national policy that the very title of his most famous work--in
English My Struggle--alluded to. As Clark (1953, 115) concluded,
Adolf Hitler's mind was captivated by evolutionary teaching--probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary
ideas--quite undisguised--lie at the basis of all that is worst in Mein Kampf--and in his public speeches.... Hitler
reasoned... that a higher race would always conquer a lower.
And Hickman (1983, 51-52) adds that: It is perhaps no coincidence that Adolph Hitler was a firm believer in and
preacher of evolutionism. Whatever the deeper, profound complexities of his psychosis, it is certain that [the concept
of struggle was important because]... his book, Mein Kampf, clearly set forth a number of evolutionary ideas,
particularly those emphasizing struggle, survival of the fittest and the extermination of the weak to produce a better
society.
And the belief that evolution can be directed by scientists to produce a "superior race," as Tenenbaum (1956, vii)
noted, was the central leitmotif of Nazism: There were many other sources from which Nazism drew its ideological
fire-water. But in that concatenation of ideas and nightmares which made up the... social policies of the Nazi state,
and to a considerable extent its military policies as well, can be most clearly comprehended in the light of its vast
racial program.
The Nazi view on race and Darwinian evolution was a major part of the fatal combination which produced the
holocaust and World War II: One of the central planks in Nazi theory and doctrine was... evolutionary theory [and]...
that all biology had evolved... upward, and that... less evolved types... should be actively eradicated [and]... that
natural selection could and should be actively aided. [T]herefore [the Nazis] instituted political measures to
eradicate... Jews, and... blacks, whom they considered... [less evolved] (Wilder-Smith 1982, 27).
Hitler's views are rather straightforward German social Darwinism

of a type widely known and accepted throughout Germany and
which, more importantly, was considered by most Germans,
scientists included, to be scientifically true.
Terms such as "superior race," "lower human types," "race contamination," "pollution of the race,"
and evolution itself (entwicklung) were often used by Hitler and other Nazis leaders. Hitler's race views were not
from fringe science, as often claimed, but rather,

Hitler's views are rather straightforward German social Darwinism of a type widely known and accepted throughout
Germany and which, more importantly, was considered by most Germans, scientists included, to be scientifically
true. More recent scholarship on national socialism and Hitler has begun to realize that... [Darwin's theory] was the
specific characteristic of Nazism. National socialist "biopolicy," [was] a policy based on a mystical-biological belief
in radical inequality, a monistic, antitranscendent moral nihilism based on the eternal struggle for existence and the
survival of the fittest as the law of nature, and the consequent use of state power for a public policy of natural
selection (Stein 1988, 51).
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Hitler: the Nazis "are barbarians! We want to be barbarians.
It is an honorable title, [for by it] we shall rejuvenate the world... "
The philosophy that we can control and even propel evolution to produce a "higher level" of human is repeatedly
echoed in the writings and speeches of prominent Nazis (Jackel 1972). Accomplishing this goal required ruthlessly
eliminating the less fit by openly barbarian behavior:
The basic outline of German social Darwinism [was that]... man was merely a part of nature with no special
transcendent qualities or special humanness. On the other hand, the Germans were members of a biologically
superior community... politics was merely the straightforward application of the laws of biology. In essence,
Haeckel and his fellow social Darwinists advanced the ideas that were to become the core assumptions of national
socialism... The business of the corporate state was eugenics or artificial selection... (Stein 1988, 56)
The German eugenists relied heavily upon the work done in Britain and America. Franz Bumm, the President of the
Reich Health Office, "noted that the value of eugenics research had been convincingly demonstrated in the United
States, where anthropological statistics had been gathered from two million men recruited for the American Armed
Forces" (Proctor 1988, 40). The various institutes began to research the persistence of various "primitive racial
traits" in various races in and outside of Germany. They found much evidence of "Cro magnon racial type in certain
populations, and presumably also Neanderthal." Like the American and British counterparts, the German Racial
Hygiene Institutes and the professors at various universities began to discover genetic evidence for virtually every
malady of humankind from criminality to hernias, and even divorce, with researchers adding a few original
problems of their own, such as "loving to sail on water." They saw their work as a noble effort to continue "Darwin's
attempts to elucidate the origin of species" (Proctor 1988, 291).
The core concept of the survival of the fittest philosophy, the observation that all animals and plants contain a
tremendous amount of genetic variety, and that in certain environmental situations some of these differences may
have an advantage in survival, and others may be at a disadvantage, has been well documented. The best example is
artificial selection, where breeders select the male and the female with the maximum trait that they are concerned
with and then, from the offspring, again select the members which maximize that trait.
The most common claim is that the German academics were coerced into accepting racist ideas. Several recent
studies, including Weindling (1989) and Proctor (1988), persuasively argue that this was not the case. The limited
coercion that occurred was often from the scientific community, rather than the German political force "imposing its
will on an apolitical scientific community" (Proctor 1988, 5; see also Wertham 1966). The Nazis forced the
dismissal of many German academics from their posts, but many were Jews, and most were dismissed for reasons
not related to their opposition to eugenics. Proctor's important study eloquently argued that Nazis are commonly
portrayed... as fanatic, half crazed criminals conducting their evil plans with as much reason or sense as 1930s
television gangsters. This is a false impression for a number of reasons, but primarily because it underestimates the
degree to which large numbers of intellectuals, often leaders in their field, were willing and eager to serve the Nazi
regime. Evidence presented in the [Nuremberg] trials reveals the involvement of doctors in a massive program for
the extermination of "lives not worth living," including, first, infants with inheritable defects, and later, handicapped
children and patients of psychiatric institutions, and finally, entire populations of "unwanted races" (1988, 5-6)
[Emphasis mine].
Chamberlain (1899) was one of the first popular German writers to use evolution to argue for the claim that the
Germans were innately biologically superior to all other races and peoples, including the Persians, Greeks, and
especially the "parasitic semites" whom he branded as a "race of inferior peoples." Darwin interpreted evolution
of homo sapiens as principally due to brain improvements, as shown by the much larger brain case in higher
primates, and especially by the apex brain found in humans. Chamberlain picked up on this, concluding that human
evolutionary differences were thus reflected in skull differences, primarily its shape and size, but also all of those
traits which have historically identified human races (skin color, nose, lip and eye shape among others). He utilized
as evidence for his theory not only physical anthropology and Darwinian evolution, but also the then fashionable
"science" of phrenology, and
Soon after the American Supreme Court ruled that sterilization of minorities was legal, Adolf Hitler's cabinet, using
the American work as an example, passed a eugenic sterilization law in 1933. The German law was compulsory to
all people, ...institutionalized or not, who suffered from allegedly hereditary disabilities including feeblemindedness,
schizophrenia, epilepsy, blindness, severe drug or alcohol addiction and physical deformities that seriously
interfered with locomotion or were grossly offensive (Kevles 1985, 116).
Ironically, the German laws were used to inspire even harsher laws back in the States--in Virginia, Dr. Joseph
DeJarnette argued that Americans who were progressive and scientific minded should be shamed by the
"enlightened" progressive German legislation, and that we should be taking the lead in this area instead of Germany.
The next step in Germany was for the government to provide "loans" to those couples that it concluded were
"racially and biologically desirable" and therefore should have more babies. The birth of each child reduced the
"loan" indebtedness by another 25%. Then came sterilization and, in 1939, euthanasia for certain classes of the
mentally or physically disabled. Up until this time, many American and British eugenists held up the German
program as a model because "it was without nefarious racial content" (Kevles 1985, 188). The German eugenists, on
the other hand, repeatedly acknowledged their enormous debt to the American and British researchers and
periodically honored eugenists from their universities with various awards.
The Jews in Germany

Eugenics and the Development of Nazi Race Policy.
Jerry Bergman
The German eugenic leadership was originally less anti-semitic than the British. Most German eugenists had
originally believed that German Jews were Aryan, and consequently the movement was supported by many Jewish
professors and doctors. The Jews were only slowly incorporated into the German eugenic laws which, up to this
time, were supported by a large number of persons, both in Germany and abroad.
German Jews considered themselves Germans first--and were proud
of being such --and Jews second. Their assimilation into German life
was to the extent that most were convinced that Germany was now a safe harbor for them.
The Darwinian racists' views also slowly entered into many spheres of German society which they had previously
not infected (Beyerchen 1977). The Pan German League, dedicated to "maintaining German Racial Purity" and
helping Germans throughout the world resist the tendency to assimilate, was at first not overtly anti-Semitic. Jews
who were fully assimilated into German culture were allowed full membership. Many German eugenists would have
accepted blacks or gypsies as being racially inferior, but their racial theories did not seem to fit Jews, since they had
achieved no small level of success in Germany. Schleunes (1970) adds that by 1903 the influence of racists' ideas
permeated the League's program to the degree that its policy changed, and by 1912 the League declared itself based
upon "racial principles."
In spite of the scientific prominence of these racial views, until World War II they had a limited effect upon most
Jews. German Jews considered themselves Germans first--and were proud of being such--and Jews second. Many
modified the German intelligentsia's racial views by including themselves in it. Their assimilation into German life
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was to the extent that most were convinced that Germany was now a safe harbor for them (Schleunes 1970, 33).
Most felt its anti-Semitic actions did not represent a serious threat to their security. Many still firmly held to the
Genesis creation model and rejected the views upon which racism was based, including macro-evolution, and thus,
did not see these ideas as a real threat. What happened in Germany later was obviously not well received by Jewish
geneticists, even Jewish eugenists, and certain other groups:
The eugenics movement felt a mixture of apprehension and admiration at the progress of eugenics in Germany...
[but] the actual details of the eugenics measures which emerged after Hitler's rise to power were not unequivocally
welcomed. Eugenicists pointed to the USA as a place where strict laws controlled marriage but where a strong
tradition of political freedom existed (Jones 1980, 168).
While in much American and British eugenic literature the Jewish race was still held up as an example of
educational and professional achievement, the Germans soon began placing them near the bottom of the list. Further,
many American and British eugenists were appalled that the Germans included "many foreign races" as inferior-including many groups such as the Southern and Eastern Europeans, which were respected groups in Britain and
America.
Individuals are not only far less important than the race, but the Nazis concluded that certain races, as Whitehead
(1983, 115) notes, were not humans, but animals: The Jews, labeled subhumans, became nonbeings. It was both
legal and right to exterminate them in the collectivist and evolutionist viewpoint. They were not considered...
persons in the sight of the German government.
Once the inferior races were exterminated, Hitler believed that

future generations would thank him profusely for the improvement that
his work brought to the world.
Hitler was especially determined to prevent Aryans from breeding with any and all non-Aryans, a concern
eventually resulting in the "final solution." Once the inferior races were exterminated, Hitler believed that future
generations would thank him profusely for the improvement that his work brought to the world:
Nazi Germany was certainly not alone in applying science to government. As Kevles (1985, 101) states, "In the
United States during the opening decades of the century, it came to be a hallmark of good reform to shape
government with the aid of scientific experts... eugenics experts aplenty were to be found in the biology,
psychology, and sociology departments of universities or colleges... "And the German eugenics programs elicited in
little opposition from the United States. The implications of its eugenic immigration acts, especially the American
Johannson act quotas of 1924, a law not repealed in 1941, had enormous consequences for human lives.
At least nine-million human beings of what Galton and Pearson called degenerative stock, two-thirds of them
the Jews... continued to be denied sanctuary at our gates. They were all ultimately heralded into Nordic
Rassenhygiene camps, where the race biologist in charge made certain that they ceased to multiply and
ceased to be (Chase 1980, 360).
The first step was to determine which groups were genetically superior,
a judgment that was heavily influenced by one's culture.
In trying to group persons into races to select the "best" Germans to serve as "official" child breeders, the Nazis
measured a wide variety of physical traits, such as brain case sizes. Although superficial observations enable most
people to make a rough classification based on white, black and oriental, when the race question is explored in
depth, such divisions are by no means easy, as the Nazis soon found out. It was further made difficult in that, with
many of the groups that they felt inferior, such as the Slovaks, Jews, Gypsies, and other groups, it was not easy to
distinguish them from the pure "Aryan" race. In general, the Nazis relied heavily upon the work of Hans F.K.
Page | 14
Gunther, who was a professor of racial science at the University of Gena. As Mosse (1981:57) acknowledged,
although Gunther's "personal relationships with the party were stormy at times, his racial ideas were accepted" and
received wide support throughout German government and were an important influence in German policy. Gunther
recognized that, while "a race may not be pure, its members share certain dominant characteristics, thus paving the
way for stereotyping (Mosse 1981:57). The goal was to find the racial "ideal type."
Gunther concluded that all Aryans share an ideal Nordic type
which contrasted with the Jews, who, he concluded, were a mixture of races.
He concluded that all Aryans share an ideal Nordic type which contrasted with the Jews, who, he concluded, were a
mixture of races. Gunther stressed both anthropological measurement of skulls, as well as an evaluation of a person's
physical appearance. The predominance of such characteristics and a person's genealogical lineage were used as
criteria. Even though physical appearance was stressed, the key was that "the body is the showplace of the soul" and
"the soul is primary" (Mosse 1981:58). Select females were placed in special homes and kept pregnant as long as
they were in the program. Even though the researchers tried to choose persons with the ideal traits, the I.Q.'s of the
resulting offspring were generally lower than that of the parents. Research on the offspring of this experiment has
concluded, as is now known, that I.Q. regresses toward the population mean.
-
Between mothers, fetuses and society:

reproductive genetics in the Israeli-Jewish context
Studies have shown that Israeli women and the Israeli legal, religious and medical establishments are exceptionally
supportive of reproductive genetics and its outcomes, in the form either of selective abortions based on the unborn
childs prospective health, or of prevention of carriers of the same recessive genetic anomaly from marrying each
other.
While reproductive genetics has been intensely criticized throughout the western world, criticism has been more or
less absent from Israeli-Jewish society. Indeed, Israeli women are heavily pressured to engage in the selection of
their embryos, or, in the ultra-Orthodox community, to marry according to genetic compatibility. Where other
theories under-stand this as deriving from collective ideals of bodily perfection that push for the selection of future
generations,
The practice of reproductive genetics in Israel is a part of a national culture of fertility, and more specifically of a
culture of new reproductive technologies. Various writers have shown Israeli society to be very family-oriented,
with high marriage rates, relatively low divorce rates and high birth rates. A complex combination of factors,
including identification with the collective goal of fighting the demographic threat (that the countrys Arab
population might eventually outnumber the Jews); the need to make Jewish babies, particularly in the wake of the
Holocaust; and the threat of losing a child in war or in a terrorist attack are all said to have influenced Israels pronatalist culture. A further factor is Jewish tradition, which sees parenthood as a moral and religious commandment
and treats infertility as a severe disability. The duty to reproduce falls upon all members of society, including its
highest religious authorities; the ideal of celibacy is absent from Judaism.
Compared to most other medically advanced nations, Israel seems to have embraced the practice of prenatal
diagnosis (PND) and premarital genetic testing to a far greater extent. Opposition to PND, which is prevalent in the
western world, is commonly grounded in arguments to do with the protection of embryos and a general opposition to
abortion; fears of interference with Gods creation, of the slippery slope leading to designer babies, or of
devaluing the life of the disabled; or a wish to hold eugenics and its moral connotations at arms length. Such
opposition is by and large lacking from Israeli public discourse.
Rather, studies have shown that both Israeli-Jewish (non-Orthodox) women16 and Israeli genetic counselors opt for
elective prenatal diagnosis, seeking to strike a balance between the quality and the sanctity of life in a manner that
Page | 15
may be interpreted by some as flexible and progressive, and by others as selective and discriminative. Larissa
Remennick18 has found that since the 1990s, the Israeli medical scene has experienced a surge in elective prenatal
genetic diagnosis, which has spread beyond risk groups to the general population of women, especially those of
Ashkenazi (i.e., central and eastern European) extraction.
Meira Weiss has claimed that Israeli parents and physicians tend to select abortion in relatively mild cases of fetal
disability. Similarly, late abortions (after viability), which are performed mostly for embryopathic reasons, are far
more common in Israel than in countries such as Germany, the US, the UK, Denmark and Canada.
Remennick, who studied the reasons why Israeli women seek prenatal genetic testing, has argued that it is mostly
due to strong institutional and health provider support of such tests, as well as to depictions of the Ashkenazi gene
pool as especially problematic, geneticization of kinship, emerging social norms that equate good mothering with
taking genetic responsibility for future offspring and the entire family, deep intolerance towards disability, and
fear of the burden of care for a disabled child in a time when the welfare system is shrinking.
Weiss has coined the term chosen body, a code for the monitoring, screening, molding and selection of
concrete Israeli bodies from womb to tomb. According to Weiss, the Israeli chosen body ideal emanates both from
the Zionist movement, which strove for the rehabilitation of the Jewish body, and from Jewish religious tradition,
which is unreceptive of severe physical and mental disability. Thus, contemporary Israeli society values healthy, fit,
competent and whole bodies. By regulating the bodies of mothers and fetuses, according to Weiss, the Israeli quest
for a perfect child also constructs Israeli collective identity.
I have argued elsewhere that it is not only fetuses that are seen first and foremost as a part of their mothers, and thus
as subordinate to them; similarly, children in Israeli-Jewish society are not perceived as autonomous human beings
bearing individual rights, or as gifts that should be accepted as is, but rather as parts of their families. It follows
that the selection of future children in keeping with their familys interests (especially the wish not to be burdened
with extra care), as well as the right to have a healthy child, are not morally condemned, but are even positively
counseled and seen as fully congruent with responsible parenthood. This stands in sharp contrast to a Habermasian
understanding, which forbids parents to become the designers of their children; to do so, in this view, would be to
transgress the legitimate borders between children and their parents and to deprive children of the potential for the
fully ethical existence of their (autonomous) self.
Between mothers, fetuses and society:
reproductive genetics in the Israeli-Jewish context
Meira Weiss - Zionism, Judaism,
and the Problem of Interference with Gods Creation
While many Christian teachings emphasize the subordination of humans to God in the process of creation, in
Judaism the accusation of playing God is misplaced. Human beings are encouraged to take an active part in Gods
creation by constantly striving to improve it, among other things by the alleviation of suffering.
The Problem of Eugenics, Jewish Tradition and Zionism

According to Immanuel Jakobovits, Jewish law has always been supportive of eugenic ideas, even in pre-modern
times, in keeping with its encouragement of individuals to take responsibility for society and for unborn generations
in a manner foreign to any preceding system of religious thought orsocial medicine. For instance, various provisions
in Jewish law from medieval times were clearly motivated by eugenic considerations for the moral excellence of the
progeny, such as the prohibition of marriage into families with hereditary disorders. On the other hand, in his essay
about Jewish eugenics, Noam Zohar contends that conventional views perceiving Jewish tradition as favoring
eugenics, or even racist (with its idea of the chosen people), rest on a one-sided reading of Jewish tradition,
Page | 16
overlooking traditional critiques of pedigree and of the notion of a Jewish race in Jewish writings. Barilan also
disagrees with Jakobovits on this point.
Page | 17
Reproductive genetics In the Israeli-Jewish context.
Dor Yeshorim (An Upright Generation), The purpose of the program is to prevent two heterozygotes from
mating, thus averting the birth of a disabled baby prior to conception. Screening is strictly anonymous, and results
are provided to the match-making organization. If both potential partners are found to be carriers of the same
abnormal allele, any steps towards an engagement are halted.
Rather, moral thinking concerning eugenics should also be understood in relation to general Jewish attitudes
toward the manipulation of life itself by modern science and technology, as well as to ideas concerning the
prevention of suffering.
However, that is not how it was seen in Israel, and even
today studies are being carried out on the Jewish Genome.
Indeed, Rafael Falk, a prominent Israeli genetics professor, reads the entire history of Zionism as a eugenicist
project. He states that the understanding of Judaism as a biological essence became an integral part of Zionist
thought towards the end of the nineteenth century. While many European Jews struggled against the idea that
Judaism is a race, prominent Zionists such as Hess, Herzl, Bialik, Nordau and even Buber argued that the biological
dimension of the Jewish Volk should not be overlooked. Sachlav Stoler-Liss, writing about Zionist motherhood,
claims that in the 1920s, 1930s and even beyond, eugenic thought was prevalent among Zionist pediatricians,
gynecologists, general practitioners and other types of experts and advisers in the yishuv (the pre-state Jewish
community of Palestine), who were trying both quantitatively and qualitatively to improve future generations
of tzabarim (Israeli-born Jews).
In fact, for most of the Israeli public and the vast majority of Israeli professionals (with the exception of a few
critical thinkers), the type of eugenics that has been condemned is seen as bearing no relation whatsoever to
contemporary practices.
However, they supported it for precisely that reason, as eugenics has no negative connotations for them, implying
only an improvement of the health of the progeny. Thus, while in the west eugenics has become a word with
nasty connotations, this is not the case in Israel.
Jewish Eugenics. John Glad

Broken down to its bare essentials, eugenics aims to incorporate human reason to influence the future human gene
pool. Rather than let nature take its course, the idea is to plan our genetic future with the same care and rational
concern as we plan the future in other areas, such as urban planning or animal husbandry. In general, eugenicists
have prized traits like high IQ and behavioral restraint, seeking to maximize these traits in the population, and to
minimize low IQ, genetic diseases, and psychopathogy.
The logic behind eugenics is impeccable. In its classical form, it proposes that qualities such as health, intelligence,
and moral character are socially valuable. Eugenicists were correct that there are strong genetic influences on these
traits, and they argued that society can promote these qualities by policies such as discouraging reproduction of
people with negative traits (negative eugenics) and encouraging reproduction of people with positive traits (positive
eugenics).
Nevertheless, the reality is that Jews have been prime beneficiaries of eugenic practices. Glads thesis is that for all
its excesses, eugenics has been an astounding, indeed an existential success for Jews, molding them into a uniquely
resourceful and intelligent people, and the current assault on eugenics by an understandably emotion-driven minority
Jewish faction represents a frontal assault on the very essence of Judaism (p. 11). This group has intimidated
Jewish supporters of eugenics, at least in Western countries. As we shall see, a watered down version of eugenics is
alive and well in Israel.
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For Glad, then, despite quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, Judaism is nothing but a cultural construct, albeit one
with a particular eugenic dynamism. That is, according to Glad, Judaism is not about preserving an ethnic coherence
but about creating a superior group with no ethnic connotations. My view is that it is both about ethnic coherence
and that eugenics was an important force in shaping modern Jewish groups, particularly the Ashkenazim.
At the same time that Jews dominated the left in the Diaspora, Zionist Jews have always had a strong attraction to
eugenics and biology (reviewed also in Separation and Its Discontents). The following are some choice quotes
from Glad: Proto-Zionist Moses Hess: The Jewish race is one of the primary races of mankind that has retained its
integrity, in spite of the continual change of its climatic environment, and the Jewish type has conserved its purity
through the centuries .
The upshot of the situation is that a group of largely Jewish activists have so successfully undermined the very
eugenic mechanism that made Jewry what it is as to pose an existential threat to Jewry. But Jewish common sense
has not only continued to hold sway in the practice of eugenics, it has even managed to surf the scientific tide of
newly found genetic knowledge all the while paying lip service to the Holocaust-from-eugenics gospel. (p. 72)
The movement against eugenics was part of a much larger picture for Jewish activists: In 1975, the UN General
Assembly declared that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination, essentially declaring the state of
Israel to be illegitimate. As a counterbalance, Jewish groups massively funded the Holocaust Memorial
Movement. In it turn, the Holocaust Memorial Movement attacked the eugenics movement with every increasing
fury.
Eugenics is alive and well in Israel, although the word eugenic is typically avoided. Glad cites an expert
suggesting that the first human clones will probably be in Israel; this will occur with the support of Orthodox
Jews. Yael Hashioni-Dolev shows that Israeli geneticists and the Israeli public strongly favor eugenic
practices. Israeli women are heavily pressured to engage in selection of their embryos, or, in the ultra-Orthodox
community, to marry according to genetic compatibility. This can be seen as an aspect of racial Zionism that
dominates contemporary Israeli political culture.
As well, Glad does not mention attempting to use eugenic practices to build a more competitive race or ethnic group.
As discussed above, Glad conceives Judaism as a non-ethnically defined but eugenically vigorous group.
However, Glad is to be congratulated for his work in showing that Jewish activists were able to manufacture the
truth that eugenics caused the Holocaust out of thin air. This should not be surprising. It is therefore no surprise
that Jewish activists were able to accomplish truth creation with the eugenics caused the Holocaust myth.
Needless to say, this ability to create truth out of thin air is a major component of Jewish power in the West today.
The timeline of Jewish eugenics provided here demonstrates beyond doubt that Jews were welcome, active
participants in the eugenics movement and that Jews even today are still in the vanguard of a eugenic worldview, a
fact entirely unknown to most people. (pgs. 71-72)
Even without this latest infusion, genetic tests have shown that the present Jewish population would appear to
have a total Negro admixture of the order of five to ten percent. (pg. 29)

The Unfabricated History of Eugenics

A book review of Dr. John Glad's Jewish Eugenics
Kevin MacDonald
There was no real connection between the Holocaust and eugenics. Eugenics was promoted in Germany by German
Jews under Hitler right up until the start of World War II. The Jews were murdered not because of eugenics but
because they were seen as a major threat to German totalitarianism.
1917: Founder of the science of biometrics William Moses Feldman (1880-1939): "Recognizing the relative
importance between heredity and environment, the Rabbis formulated certain rules and principles of selective
breeding, or, as Galton has named it, 'eugenics,' for the deliberate purpose of permanently raising the standard of the
Jewish race. 'Eugenics,' says Sir Francis Galton, 'deals with what is more valuable than money or lands namely the
heritage of a high character, capable brains, fine physique, and vigour and deserves to be strictly enforced as a
religious duty.' And such was also the opinion of the Jewish sages in the time of the Talmud."
1922: Jewish-Polish eugenicist Zewy Parnass: "Our religious regulations indicate that hygiene, and particularly
racial hygiene, is what we were aiming for in social life. Let us revive old rules in accordance with the spirit of the
past; revive them and we will get the solution to all the problems, solutions which are an ideal for the European
eugenicists. They dream of the time when the necessity of race hygiene will be so deeply rooted in social
consciousness that it becomes a kind of social religion. We have had this religion for a long time; it arose in the
Jewish tradition in Palestine. "The whole legislation of Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud, in the chapters relating to
national and racial life, forms the greatest book of eugenic laws. "In the course of time each incurably ill patient will
voluntarily undergo sterilization. And those that oppose it will be stigmatized by public opinion as social outcasts
who dared to contradict nationally sacred values."
Meira Weiss, The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society
how Israeli society selects and rejects, idealizes and stigmatizes bodies: how it transforms bodies
into ritual and political statement.
Arthur W. Frank
Henry Friedlander
From Euthanasia to the Final Solution
Nazi racial ideology centered on the Germanic people, the Volk, as the wellspring of the national community,
the Volksgemeinschaft. All those who did not belong to the so-called nordic race, regardless of their citizenship,
were to be excluded from the national community. The Nazis did not invent their racial ideology; they simply
adopted it from already existing and pervasive popular beliefs. Following the period of the American and French
revolutions, who championed, in word if not always in deed, the idea of the "equality of man," popular beliefs
continued during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contradict these lofty ideas. At the same time,
scientific opinion adopted as scientific truth the idea of the inequality of human beings. Scientists in Europe and
America legitimized the popular beliefs that women were inferior to men and that members of all other races were
inferior to white Christian Europeans. The great fear of the European people was a dilution of their "superior" racial
stock. For this reason they saw miscegenation as a threat to their survival. In the United States, laws against the
miscegenation of whites and blacks were found in many states, especially those of the south.
The movement designed to retain the purity of the gene pool was called eugenics, a term coined in 1881 by the
British naturalist and mathematician Francis Galton and described by the leading American eugenicist, Charles B.
Davenport, as "the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding." Its members were scientists
from the biological and social sciences, or what today may be called the life sciences. The eugenics movement was
international; it was particularly influential in the United States, which served as a model for eugenicists in Germany
and other countries.
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Eugenicists attacked the problem of how to improve the gene pool on two fronts. One was "positive" eugenics, and
attempt to increase the numbers of the desirable population. This was an effort to persuade those judged to have the
best pedigree to marry each other and to bear a large number of children; this approach was later applied in fascist
countries, where medals and benefits were offered to the mothers of many children. But positive eugenics was never
very successful, since the wealthier classes simply did not have enough children.
The second front was "negative" eugenics. This was an effort to prevent the undesirable masses to increase in
numbers. The eugenicists viewed the lower classes as a danger to the purity of the race.
After the Nazi assumption of power, when the eugenic society embraced racial antisemitism and expelled Jewish
members, race hygiene was the only term used, and thereafter it became the appropriate term to designate eugenics
in Germany. Racial antisemitism had played no role in the early years of German eugenics, but this changed during
the Weimar Republic. Already in 1924 von Verschuer told students that "the German, vlkisch struggle is primarily
directed against the Jews, because alien Jewish penetration is a special threat to the German race." After the Nazi
assumption of power in January 1933, the scientific practitioners of racial hygiene embraced the party's ideology,
and provided the scientific legitimacy the regime desired. Already in 1931, two years before Hitler's assumption of
power, Lenz provided the Nazi leader with the following testimonial: "Hitler is the first politician with truly wide
influence who has recognized that the central mission of all politics is race hygiene and who will actively support
this mission."
The sterilization law was designed to deal with hereditary diseases and persons carrying such diseases. The opening
of the law proclaimed its content: "Any person suffering from a hereditary disease can be sterilized if medical
knowledge indicates that his offspring will suffer from severe hereditary physical or mental damage." The
legislation listed the disabilities covered by the law, including most mental and psychological disorders, epilepsy,
blindness, deafness, physical deformity, severe alcoholism, and especially feeblemindedness. A special legal system
of hereditary health courts, staffed by one judge and two physicians, was created to handle the large number of
sterilization cases. The law also created appellate courts of hereditary health, also staffed by one judge and two
physicians; its decision was final. About 375,000 German nationals were sterilized under this law. This is a very
high figure, since it representing about 5 percent of the German population. Amendments to the law widened its
reach. The most important of these was issued on 26 June 1935, permitting, by special orders of the Fhrer,
abortions performed to prevent births of children with hereditary taints; this would apply not only if the mother was
diseased but also if the mother was healthy but the father suffered from a hereditary disease. At the same time, the
amendment restated the prohibition under heavy penalties of sterilization and abortion for persons judged healthy.

A little noticed 2011 book by academic Etan Bloom revealed that the father of Israeli sociology and a leading
Zionist of the British Mandate named Arthur Ruppin, was a believer in eugenics. In 1919 he argued that the Jewish
race should be purified and that it was desirable that only the racially pure come to the land. As head of the
Palestine Office of the Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency for Israel), he put his purity schemes into
practice, arguing that Ethiopian Jews should not be permitted to immigrate, because they have no blood
connection, and arguing that Yemenite Jews should be brought only for menial labor.
Ruppin and his fellow travelers were able to influence the Zionist movement, tragically in retrospect, to view nonEuropeans as a different caste and to back up their arguments with outdated theories of eugenists. For instance,
Chaim Sheba, who became director general of the Health Ministry in 1950, argued, according to a 2005 report that
a high concentration of those ill in body and soul would jeopardize the future of Jewish community in Israel. To
support his argument, he used examples from genetic theories which purported to show national gene pools
weakened through a lack of genetic vigilance. Sheba was influential in temporarily preventing Cochin Jews from
immigrating. The communist newspaper Davar asserted that a community with numerous sick, decadent,
unrestrained elements will not withstand the social and security test. Haaretz writer Arieh Gledblum claimed in
1950 that North African Jews primitivism is unsurpassed. They have little talent for comprehending anything
intellectual and lack any roots in Judaism.

Page | 20
Since the 1950s, this legacy of ethnocentrism has haunted Israel. When the philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Israel
in 1961, she described her fear of Jews who looked Arab but spoke Hebrew, calling them an Oriental mob.
Seth J. Frantzman is the opinion editor of the Jerusalem Post.
Jewish eugenics pre-dates. Hitler's Master Race
According to the Israeli daily newspaper quoted below, before the Nazi Third Reich in Germany plotted to create a
Master Race from the European gene pool, Zionists had already established a racial purification program to create
the perfect Jewish bloodline.
A shocking new study reveals how key figures in the pre-state Zionist establishment proposed castrating the
mentally ill, sterilizing the poor and doing everything possible to ensure reproduction only among the `best of
people.'
Castrating the mentally ill, encouraging reproduction among families "numbered among the intelligentsia" and
limiting the size of "families of Eastern origin" and "preventing ... lives that are lacking in purpose" - these proposals
are not from some program of the Third Reich but rather were brought up by key figures in the Zionist establishment
of the Land of Israel during the period of the British Mandate. It turns out there was a great deal of enthusiasm here
for the improvement of the hereditary characteristics of a particular race (eugenics). This support, which has been
kept under wraps for many years, is revealed in a study that examines the ideological and intellectual roots at the
basis of the establishment of the health system in Israel.
In the Yishuv (pre-state Jewish community) in the 1930s there were "consultation stations" operating on a Viennese
model of advice centers for couples that wished to marry and become parents. In Austria, with the Nazis' rise to
power, they served for forced treatment. Here the stations were aimed at "giving advice on matters of sex and
marriage, especially in the matter of preventing pregnancy in certain cases." They distributed birth-control devices
for free to the penniless and at reduced prices to those of limited means.
The father of the theory of eugenics was British scholar Francis Galton. It was he who coined the term - which
literally means "well-born" - at the end of the 19th century. The aim of the eugenics movement was to better the
human race. Galton proposed a plan to encourage reproduction among "the best people" in society and to prevent
reproduction among "the worst elements."
"I'm not making a value judgment," says Stoler-Liss. "Zionism arose at a certain period, in a certain ideological
atmosphere - there were all kinds of ideas in the air and there were also eugenicist Zionists. Some of the doctors
were educated in Europe, and at that time the medical schools taught not only medicine but also the theory of
eugenics."
The Jews are, for him, a mixture of all the races. They are the people who are most conscious of their blood unity,
and they have preserved more of the inherited characteristics than any other race. It is their agility and intellectual
keenness and their power of assimilation which he considers to be the cause of the feeling which has been
engendered against the Jews. He keeps free from any abuse or any taint of anti-Semitism; it is to him merely an
Ethnological problem. M. Gaster
Rassenkunde des deutschen volkes.
Dr. Hans F. R. GUNTHER. 1930

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keeping it kosher

on Meira Weiss and the chosen body, jewish self-hatred,
aryanization & the final solution.
The terrible massacres of the Jews, in 1391, form a turning- point in Spanish history. They mark the end of the ages
of toleration, during which the Peninsula afforded a refuge to the unfortunate children of Israel, and the
commencement of the fierce spirit of persecution which rendered the Inquisition inevitable, which expelled the Jews
and Moors, and which, by insisting on absolute uniformity of belief, condemned Spain to the material and
intellectual lethargy that marked its period of decadence. The popular temper which rendered the massacres possible
had been in course of development for a generation, but the outbreak was the work of one man, Ferrand Martinez,
Archdeacon of Ecija, who presents himself to us as the ideal example of the mediaeval zealot. The document,
hitherto inedited, appended to this paper throws some light on the movements preliminary to the massacres and on
the unbending resolution of the man to accomplish what he regarded as his duty to God.1 In spite of the canon law
which condemns the Jews to perpetual servitude in punishment for the Crucifixion, and in spite of the repeated
urgency of the Holy See, Spain, up to the fourteenth century, had consistently treated them with a reasonable degree
of equity. They were not popular favorites, however, for their keen intelligence and business capacity had enabled
them to control the finances of the land, both public and private, and the occupations of farmers of the revenue, taxcollectors, and money-lenders, which were almost exclusively in their hands, were not calculated to ingratiate them
with the people, while the ostentation with which their wealth was displayed was provocative of ill-feeling. There
was, therefore, a certain amount of latent popular prejudice, which was capable of being aroused to activity, and to
this task the Church of Spain addressed itself.
The general council of Vienne, in 1311-1312, although it did not add to the numerous oppressive canons directed
against the Jews, took occasion to reprehend in the strongest manner the freedom of worship allowed in Spain to the
Moors, and it sharpened the decrees against usury.' The Spanish prelates at the council, in their intercourse with their
brethren from other lands, doubtless had full opportunity of learning, what was thought of Spanish tolerance towards
both Moors and Jews, and they seem to have returned home fully inspired with the proscriptive spirit, for the
provincial councils subsequently held throughout Spain eagerly endeavored to separate the races and to destroy the
kindly intercourse and neighborliness which had existed from time immemorial. Undoubtedly these efforts must
have stimulated prejudice and sharpened antagonism, but they were barren of visible results, for the Jews were too
useful to the ruling classes to lack protectors. Not only were they indispensable to the royal filnances, but the heavy
taxation levied upon them formed a notable and most reliable portion of the revenues of the crown and of the nobles,
the churches and the municipalities.
Martinez and the Massacres of 1391
H. C. Lea
New Perspectives on Antisemitism

in the Age of High Imperialism
Christian S. Davis
The Hammer also printed letters like the vivid account from one reader, If today a good friend entered my room
and said he wanted to settle in our colonies, I would immediately send for a doctor and have him examined for
sunstroke. In addition, this chapter presents persuasive evidence for the antisemitic sentiments of leading
imperialist figures.
Page | 22
In chapter 2 Davis argues that the representations of Jews and Africans merged, especially in the last decade before
WWI. Davis includes evidence that shows racist thinking even by the critics of Germanys empire and claims,
together these comments betray the power of the rhetoric of radical difference, showing that it eventually
influenced the thinking of even colonialisms harshest critics (p. 89). Here more evidence could have solidified
Daviss claim for the increased racism of left-wing politicians and change over time. In the core of his chapter,
Davis finds overlap in the images of Africans and Jews. Both were allegedly immoral, rootless, lazy, uncreative,
nomadic, hyper-sexual, and hostile to non-Jewish Germans. He also describes direct links between these groups in
the antisemitic press. These findings should help shape our understanding of popular racist perceptions in the late
imperial period. The predominant antisemitic image of a Jew was of a decadent, over-intellectualized, and sly
individual that would seem the direct opposite the racist fantasy of the black savage. Daviss research provides
new evidence for the flexibility within antisemitic and black stereotypes.
The American Hebrew
& Jewish Messenger, Volume 107, Issues 14-26
No unbiased ethnologist will question the fact that the Jewish people are a nation of hybrids; that gentile blood of
many kinds has been infused into the people in large proportions in the course of time. In-deed, none of the peoples
of Christendom has been more unremittingly exposed to hybridization, in spite of all the stiff
The Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modern Europe
Thorstein Veblen
. The hybrid antecedents of the Children of Israel are not a mere matter of bookish record. Evidence of their
hybrid de-scent is written all over them, wherever they are to be met with, so that in this respect the Jews of Europe
are in the same case as the other Europeans, who are also universally cross-bred. It would perplex any
anthropologist to identify a single individual among them all who could safely be set down as embodying the Jewish
racial type without abatement. The variations in all the measurable traits that go to identify any individual in the
schedules of the anthropologists are wide and ubiquitous as regards both their physical and their spiritual traits, in
respect of anthropometric measurements as well as in temperament and capacities. And yet, when all is said in
abatement of it, the Jewish type, it must be admitted, asserts itself with amazing persistence through all the disguises
with which it has been overlaid in the course of age-long hybridization. Whatever may be found true elsewhere, in
their contact with other racial types than those of Europe, it still appears that within this European racial
environment the outcome given by any infusion of Jewish blood in these cross-bred individuals is something which
can be identified as Jewish. Cross-breeding commonly results in a gain to the Jewish community rather than
conversely; and the hybrid offspring is a child of Israel rather than of the gentiles. In this respect the Jews are
neither more nor less fortunate than their gentile compatriots.
The Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modern Europe
The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews.

Susan Zuccotti
Controversy continues to swirl around the Vichy government's role in the extermination of Jews during the Second
World War. Masses of archival documentation relating to this episode have yet to be declassified, and recent debates
over whether to try former Vichy officials Paul Touvier, Maurice Papon, and Rend Bousquet for their role in antiJewish actions have been as acrimonious as ever.' Moreover, although the book by Michael R. Marrus and Robert
Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York, 1981), demolished the myth that Vichy collaboration in anti-Jewish
actions was merely the result of German pressure, questions remain over the extent of Vichy autonomy in the
formulation and execution of anti-Semitic policies as well as the degree of popular support these policies enjoyed.
Susan Zuccotti takes a fresh look at these questions. Although dealing with all aspects of the Holocaust in France,
Zuccotti's principal focus is public opinion. Insofar as she deals with government policy and Jewish responses, she
relies heavily on secondary works. In assessing public opinion, however, Zuccotti utilizes a wide array of previously
untapped sources, including extensive interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish participants, as well as a wealth of
recently published memoirs. By interweaving personal testimonies with straightforward historical narrative, a technique she used effectively in her first book, The Italians and the Holocaust (New York, 1987), Zuccotti presents a
nuanced and detailed analysis of French opinion toward Jews during this era. Zuccotti estimates that there were
Page | 23
approximately 330,000 Jews in France in June 1940, 195,000 of whom were French citizens and 135,000
nonnaturalized foreigners. Nearly seventy-six thousand of these were deported to death camps in the East and
another thousand or so died in France. Foreign Jews suffered the worst fate: approximately 80 percent of the
deportees were foreign Jews or their French-born children.
Vicki CARON Brown University
Page | 24
Edwin Black, War Against the Weak:
Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
Edwin Black claims that when he began work on War Against the Weak in 2001, public awareness of eugenics was
limited. Two years later the topic is "where it belongs, in the hands of hard-driving journalists and historians who
will not stop until they have uncovered all the facts." As a result "the field will soon be as broad and diversified as
the investigations of the Holocaust and American slavery" (p. xxiii). Black argues that eugenics was a coordinated
campaign among American academic, industrial, and government leaders to "immediately sterilize four-teen million
people in the United States and millions more worldwide ... until only a pure Nordic super race remained" (p. xvi).
Moreover, this national infrastructure to "cleanse America of its 'unfit'" was grounded in widespread academic fraud.
War Against the Weak's main narrative begins in Victorian England with Spencer, Darwin, and Galton, and then
jumps to the United States in the years after 1900, focusing on Charles Davenport's campaign to interest the
Carnegie Institution of Washington in the study of heredity. Major sections are devoted to Davenport and Harry
Laughlin's promotion of compulsory sterilization laws, Laughlin's involvement with immigration restriction, Buck v.
Bell, and the efforts of Virginia health official Walter Pleckert o prevent white-black" mongrelization."
Backdoor to Eugenics. Troy Duster.

Backdoor to Eugenics is a careful, almost cautious, study of the shift from the predominance of social and
environmental explanations and treatments for health and related pathologies in the United States to theories that
emphasize genetically inherited propensities, primarily by race, class, and ethnicity. Troy Duster's argument is that
hidden economic, political, and ideological interests account for the tacit, although rarely overt, return to the once
discredited "science" of eugenics. Duster adduces considerable evidence of the recent and subtler return of scientific
correlations, largely by means of statistics, between class and race and such categories as intelligence, mental
illness, and mortality. According to Duster, this regrettable turn of events results from the deployment of molecular
biology over the past three decades and the technologies that make it possible, particularly bioengineering. This
book concomitantly provides considerable weight to the argument that genetic accounts are constitutive of
contemporary conservative thought. Duster's caution consists in his refusal to impute malicious intention to those
who have insisted that genetics is the principal cause of a wide range of diseases, particularly heart disease, infant
mortality, cancer, and mental illness as well as of the highly publicized increase in crime and decline of educational
performance, especially among minorities and the poor. Instead, employing insights derived from recent work in the
sociology of scientific knowledge, he shows that, in addition to fame, fortune, and corporate profits-factors he does
not ignore-biological explanations for social and medical pathologies are deep-seated ideologies, among both
scientists and nativist social movements, that span the 19th and 20th centuries. Duster provides a useful history of
the use of eugenics arguments, which were based on imputations of the connection between ethnicity and IQs
measured by faultily administered tests, to restrict immigration in the first decades of this century. He also performs
skillful, sometimes brilliant, deconstructive analyses of the key studies that have been used in the current eugenics
revival. Where the earlier eugenics was employed primarily against Jews and other European immigrants, current
statistical studies, directly and indirectly, serve social policy formulations that exacerbate racial discrimination and
official neglect of the problems of African-Americans.
Anglo-Jewish Scientists and the Science of Race

Todd M. Endelman

The belief in innate racial differences was well entrenched in Western science by the start of the twentieth century. It
was widely believed that the worlds population was divided into distinct races and that the physical and cultural
differences among them were rooted in biology. For Jewish physicians and academics, for whom science was
supposed to be a neutral arena in which their Jewishness was irrelevant, the ubiquity of this belief was a challenge,
both to their professional authority and their emotional equanimity. It was not the idea of race itself that was
troublesome but rather the subsidiary idea that invariably accompanied it - the belief that races were ranked
hierarchically and that Jews were an inferior race, marked by a distinctive mental and physical pathology. Jewish
Page | 25
scientists who wanted to think of themselves as neutral observers found themselves in the uncomfortable position of
being both the observer and the denigrated object of observation.1 Those who tried to escape this double
bind pursued various strategies. Some disputed the stability and permanence of racial traits and the existence of pure
races. Others internalized racial thinking and then unconsciously reworked and subverted its premises. Still others
accepted the idea of racial differences but turned conventional stereotypes on their head.
Jewish scientists in Central Europe experienced the double bind more acutely than their counterparts elsewhere in
the West. The stigmatization of Jewishness was more pervasive and the barriers to career advancement higher than
in Western Europe. By comparison, few Jews in early twentieth-century Britain found themselves in a similar
position. In part, this was due to the occupational aspirations of the Anglo-Jewish middle class, which did not, as a
rule, view the academy and the laboratory as arenas in which to pursue social prestige and material success. This
was also due to the relative disinterest of British scientists (with the notable exception of the eugenicist Karl
Pearson) in Jews.2 While they were not altogether absent in British social scientific and racial literature, they were
not the prime focus of its gaze, which was directed outward to the more exotic peoples of the British Empire
or downward to the urban poor at home. Events abroad - the India mutiny (1857), the Jamaica revolt (1865), and the
Boer War (1899 - 1902) - and the differential birth rate between the upper and middle ranks, on the one hand, and
the lower ranks, on the other, fed and formed British anxieties about racial fitness and racial degeneration
more than concerns about Jewish domination. While John Efron exaggerated when he wrote Jews as Jews simply
failed to arouse British scientific curiosity, he was not altogether wrong.
Still, it would be a mistake to assume that Anglo-Jewish scientists in the early twentieth century, however small
their number, were able to ignore notions of racial difference. Whatever its place in British science, racial discourse
was too pervasive in cultural and political life to allow them to escape or ignore its influence. Jewish writers,
preachers, and publicists, most of whom were not biological determinists, repeatedly referred to Jews as a race.
Their use of the term was imprecise, which is not surprising, given the fluidity and inconsistency of racial
thinking. It often functioned as a synonym for Jewish peoplehood, signifying little more than the collective nature of
Jewish life and fate.
Before the rise of Nazism,
the most prominent Anglo-Jewish scientist to address notions of
racial difference was the geneticist Redcliffe Nathan Salaman (18741955)
DEFENDERS OF THE RACE.
EFRON. A review by Sander Gilman
Everyone knows the common wisdom-Jews are victims and often victims of the best and the brightest of their
tormentors. They were victims of Christian theologians in the medieval Church, they were victims of racist scientists
in the nineteenth cen-tury, they were victims of the Nazi doctors and intellectuals, they are victims of the intellectual
leaders of the African-American community (or at least the Nation of Islam) today. Jews are victims and that
precludes much. The common wisdom here as in so many other places is simply wrong. We now know that Jews
were not perpetual victims. That they confronted their Christian rulers and the theologians in debates in the Middle
Ages and the Reforma-tion, they fought back against Nazi barbarism, and they organize to confront anti- Semitism
today in whatever shape and form it is found. The image of the passive Jew as victim is countered by the image of
the active Jew as aggressor. Never again! But there is a third possibility, one which John Efron, a brilliant younger
historian at Indiana University, explores in his new book on Jews and racial science in the nine-teenth century. Efron
examines a case where Jews accepted the very fabric of the arguments of their opponents about them, often times
reshaping their opponents' ideas of the Jews in order to make them palatable for Jews. No arena is more contested or
more important in the nineteenth century than racial science. From the eighteenth cen-tury on, the science of race
had been the common thread that tied together all the arenas of the "science of man." From Immanuel Kant's
Anthropology in the 1790's to the physical anthropological studies of Hans Gunther in the 1930's, race (and that
meant the Jews) served as a central pattern in defining who was (and who wasn't) human. In-deed, it defined who
would live and who would die. Efron spins the tale of how Jewish scientists got involved in the race business, as lay
scholars and then as physician/scientists. His focus is England and Germany, but he could have easily expanded his
view to include France and the United States during the period from 1880 to 1914.
John Efron. Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siecle Europe.
The University of Chicago SANDER L. GILMAN
Page | 26
A Life (Un)Worthy of Living,
Hashiloni-Dolev
In 1993-95 the bioethicists Dorothy C. Wertz and John C. Fletcher did a survey of the attitudes of geneticists in 37
Countries She writes that she was amazed by the information supplied by Wertz: I was shocked to find out
how exceptional the Israeli public and professional attitude to reproductive genetics was. Given the ongoing
massive Jewish assault on eugenics, the data are indeed sobering. Israeli and German eugenicists find themselves at
opposite ends of the eugenics spectrum, the Germans being reticent and halfhearted, while the Israelis are
enthusiastic: for example, 68% of the Israeli geneticists as opposed to only 8% of their German colleagues
considered it socially irresponsible to
knowingly bring an infant with a serious genetic disorder into the world in an era of prenatal diagnosis. That is,
two-thirds of Israeli geneticists favored abortion on eugenic grounds.
History: although the Jewish state is often justified in popular Jewish discourse as a consequence of the
Holocaust, the prominent Israeli geneticist Rafael Falk describes the entire history of Zionism as a eugenicist
project. Hashiloni-Dolev comments: Israeli counselors have a double eugenic memory of both the atrocities of the
Nazis and the Zionist soft eugenic history. The not criticized Zionist-Jewish soft eugenic history is alive and
well, although it is also never explicitly connected to todays practices. Israelis are not burdened by the accusation
of anti-Semitism and images of the Holocaust which have become the lingua franca of post-war West German
political culture and which are used by both leftists and conservatives as a sledgehammer technique in political
disputes.
Eugenics: loud opposition in Germany, no debate in Israel. In summation this is a very honest, revealing book
written by a sincere author toward whom the reader cannot help but feel a great deal of sympathy. For better or
worse, it does have the feel of an academic dissertation, and toward the end there
is a slight and entirely forgivable tendency toward the anecdotal. The style editor knew his business, which is
important since the authors native language is Hebrew, but there are a few rough spots a good copy editor should
have caught. It is unfortunate that the price is so high ($129) that sales will be limited almost exclusively to
university libraries. But the e-book version ought to be much cheaper but is evidently not yet available.
This is an important, factual, non-ideological study that deserves the widest possible audience. If you do not have
access to the book itself, dont miss Hashiloni-Dolevs very fine article on Jewish-Israeli eugenics,
Beginning in the eighteenth century, even sympathetic advocates of Jewish civic equality had been in general
agreement that ghetto life had produced a physically degenerate and diseased Jewish community plagued by
parasites, germs, cancer, abnormality, and physical weakness.
Many of these pathologies were considered heritable and immutable. In as much as the Jews were relocating
westward on a massive basis, such a concept was injurious not only to Jewish self-image, but also to the residents of
the countries that receieved them. Thus, the conditions of the ghetto came to be
represented in an entirely new light as a selectionary process that had qualitatively winnowed out the Jews and
permitted only the best to survive thanks to superior sanitation, natural disease resistance, and high intelligence.
Numerous Jewish and non-Jewish texts presented the Bible and Talmud as codes of
hygiene and health. Hart characterizes such views as the nexus of Moses, Judaism, and hygiene. (Remember that
eugenics was often referred to as racial hygiene.) Jewish ritual was portrayed as a model for societies in general.
And Hart goes on to point that ultimately science even replaced theology in
framing the terms of the debate. What should we make of the strategy of translation and equivalence in the context
of the first half of the twentieth century, in Europe and America? he asks. What did it mean at the time to want to
make Judaism and eugenics compatible?

The power of knowledge: race science, race policy, and the Holocaust
JAY WEINSTEIN and NICO STEHR
This dramatic shift from religious to biological anti-Semitism is one of the elements that sets the Holocaust apart
from earlier instances of Jewish persecution and genocide;* for it automatically condemned the religious and the
irreligious, the orthodox and the convert, and the dead, the living, and the unborn to a common fate."
Page | 27
Paradoxically, in this age of globalization, race and apposite concepts are experiencing a period of considerable
cultural resonance, as is evident from the frequency and intensity of debate on the subject played out in the mass
media, in political forums, and in academic circles. A range of academics, including social scientists, natural
scientists, and some self-identified critical scholars, have increasingly granted race and} or climate a central
explanatory role in accounting for inequalities or group differences. " Based on the case study we have documented,
it is evident that such an approach can acquire considerable power in practice quite independent of its ` objective
merits.
The time is coming, and now is, when men will no longer refuse to accept these things as a matter of course and to
charge them up against some mysterious providence. The time is com-ing, and now is, when men must search into
the causes of these things and must resolutely refuse to be frightened off in this inquiry. The time has already come
when men are prepared to say that it is not necessary, either in the will of God or in the nature of things, that there
should be so many mal-endowed and deformed lives who are unfitted for any large and worthy place in society. The
time has arrived when it is no longer possible to charge up these things to the sovereign and inscrutable decree of
God or to the mysterious and haphazard operations of Nature. There remains only one other cause and influence to
be investigated and this is the human cause and the social influence. The time has come when society itself must be
investigated, that we may know how far society is responsible for the burdens that society has to bear. The time has
come when man himself must be placed upon the witness stand that we may know how far he has contributed
toward these tragic results.
A most encouraging beginning has been made in this direction and some suggested inquiries have been started. Thus
this factor of heredity has been investigated and some valuable books on the subject have been written. But recently
it has been considered in its relation to social welfare, and a new science has been born, that of eugenics. In the
words of its most distinguished exponent: Eugenics deals with what is more valuable than money or lands, namely,
the heritage of a high character, capable brains, fine physique and vigor; in short, with all that is most desirable for a
family to possess as a birth right. It aims at the evolution and preservation of high races of men, and it as well
deserves to be strictly enforced as a religious duty."'
The improvement of the race can be brought about, for one thing, by encouraging the reproduction of the fit.
Various causes, as Galton has shown in his various writings, have contributed to hinder the multiplication of the fit,
and among these may be named war, sacerdotal celibacy, and a false social sentiment with respect to the number of
children. The lessening of the number of the unfit may be brought about by segregation-to some extent carried on at
present-which in some measure shall check the reproduction of the unfit. Society must insist upon a more intelligent
and rigorous segregation of the mal-endowed and defective, and must provide that where the parties to a marriage
are unfit for the parental responsibility and the begetting of normally endowed children that no such union shall be
permitted. In a small way society recognizes its duty in this direction today, and in every civilized land homes and
asylums are provided for the feeble minded and the insane. Here these persons are cared for and an effort is made to
help them and to prepare them for claiming and resuming their place in society. But society must be more rigid in its
paternal care, and must provide "that where both stocks are heavily tainted," says Havelock Ellis, "and both tainted
in the same direction, it ought to be generally felt that union for purposes of procreation is out of the question." "I
think that the doctor ought to have a voice in every marriage which is contracted," says Dr. WVestermarck.
"Much progress has been made in this respect in the course of evolution, and it would be absurd to believe that we
have vet reached the end of this process. It would be absurd to believe that men would forever leave to individual
caprice the performance of the most important, and in its consequences the most far reaching function which has
fallen to the lot of mankind." "There ought to be a social conscience in such matters," says Havelock Ellis. This
public opinion will strongly condemn the output of children by diseased and intemperate men and women, and will
make them bear the shame of their misdeeds. We may not agree with Dr. G. Archdale Reid, in all of his conclusions,
but he is unquestionably right in the conviction that "there can be no hope of amendment except through an
enlightened public opinion, which will forbid the output of children from families in which any taint of mental
unsoundness has appeared."
Public opinion can do much in other directions in creating a higher sense of parental responsibility which shall hold
parents to a rigid account for those whom they bring into the world. The time is coming, and already now is, when
we must cease talking of delinquent children and must begin to talk of delinquent parents. The time is coming, and
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now is, when the man and the woman who would enter the marriage relation must prove that they are mentally and
morally and physically fit to be intrusted with the responsibility of marriage and consequent parenthood. In a word,
there are two propositions-axioms they should be called-which men must recognize and apply in all their bear-ings.
Every child has the right to be well born, to have decent, clean, untainted, well-endowed parents. Every child has the
right to a good fair start in life, with unpoisoned blood and average endowment.
The Chosen Body touches not at all on the contexts cited above. Israel was born in 1948 in an uneasy balance of
triumph and tragedy. It has existed in that perpetual uneasy balance, imposed and self-inflicted, since it was
conceived as an idea in the 19th century.
Weiss traces the Zionist story of the historic origin of the need for "new Jew for a new nation," physically distinct
from the weakling of the Diaspora. She shows the centrality of the male body in the Israeli body politic, a point
made by psychologist Lesley Hazleton in her 1977 book, Israeli Women: The Reality Behindt he Myths. The
difference between Weiss's focus and other feminist anthropologists writing about Israel is that they focused on the
impact of the patriarchal body on women. Weiss's focus is squarely on the body of the idealized, perfectly formed,
physically strong, young Israeli male of European ancestry. His is the "new Jew for the new nation," the Chosen
People's Chosen Body in the modern state. Weiss traces the impact of the idealized male "chosen body" on the
"body politic" in Israeli culture as a collectivity. She sees the idealized male "chosen body" as the "root cultural
idiom, "a "deep structure," that underlies an ongoing attempt to define a "core collective identity" in Israeli society.
Social paradigms are articulated through the body." [C]oncrete Israeli bodies are screened and molded from their
birth to their death" by the idealized chosen body. She is certain that despite the profound changes in Israeli society
since its formation, the dynamic she describes remains unchanged.
Meira Weiss, The Chosen Body

The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society
The study of the body as an indicator of cultural difference began with the rise of modern anthropology at the turn of
the twentieth century. At that point, anthropologists such as Arnold van Gennep and Franz Boas showed how the
body presented universals of human evolutionary or cultural development. What is true about the body in any given
society, they argued, is true of all bodies-at least potentially. Foucault's arguments have much the same thrust. If
power exists, then it deforms the body in similar ways in all societies, at least after a certain point in history. PostFoucauldian scholars, however, have made exactly the opposite argument.
A comparison between the two societies--so different in their motivation and imagery and yet so similar in their
response (as opposed to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Sweden)-could be profitable for a
future study. Here too I would wonder whether disability is a category differentiated in subtle ways in the various
cultural groups that compose contemporary Israel. Weiss's book is well thought through, well written, very
engaging, and peppered with personal extracts and diary entries. The author provides a middle ground between the
neutral observer and the participant-observer that really works. We have a real sense of where Weiss wants to situate
herself and the anxiety that this situation can generate in writing about a society with which she is overidentified.
This is a solid contribution to the sociological study of the body and to the "problem" of Jewish self-representation
in the ultimate Diaspora state, Israel.
Sander L. GILMAN
Christian Ingrao. Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine

Anna Maria Droumpouki
Is the intellectual elite capable of committing terrible crimes? Can an intellectual be part of a genocidal operation, a Page | 29
machinery of death? Why did a sample of 80 German academics,
with high profiles and, in some cases, brilliant minds, join the repressive bodies of the Third Reich, especially the
Security Service (SD) and the Nazi partys elite protection unit, the SS?
How could they theorise and plan the extermination of 20 million individuals of allegedly inferior races? Most of
them became members of the paramilitary death squads known as the
Einsatzgruppen and participated in the slaughter of over a million people. The Einsatzgruppen
were responsible for mass killings, primarily by shooting, and carried out operations that
in cases lasted for days, such as the massacre at Babi Yar, one of the largest massacres in
the history of the Holocaust (2930 September 1941). How can we interpret the mass participation of these people in
the genocidal machinery of the Nazis?
In this book, Christian Ingrao tells the gripping story of 80 intellectuals who were young
(barely in their 30s), clever and cultivated, and analyses the complicated mechanisms of their political commitment.
This is a history of the executioners, not the victims. What is most interesting is the fact that Ingrao analyses Nazism
as a system of beliefs. His explanation for the intellectual activism of these people is debatable; the interaction of
knowledge, activism and levels of cultural sophistication
Cursed by Eugenics
Paul Gray
In the U.S., biologist Charles Davenport (1866-1944) established, with the help of a $10 million endowment from
the Carnegie Institution, a center for research in human evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. A strict Mendelian,
Davenport believed so-called single-unit genes determined such traits as alcoholism and feeblemindedness.
The way to eradicate such failings in the human stock, he argued, was to prevent their carriers from
reproducing. He voiced the hope that "human matings could be placed upon the same high plane as that
of horse breeding." He declared that prostitution was not caused by poverty but by an "innate eroticism."
He advocated eugenic castrations.
In his In the Name of Eugenics (1985), an invaluable source for everyone interested in this strange
movement, historian Daniel J. Kevles notes, somewhat dryly, that "eugenicists identified human worth with the
qualities they presumed themselves to possess--the sort that facilitated passage through schools,
universities and professional training." Kevles' insight helps explain the almost messianic fervor that
eugenicists on both sides of the Atlantic displayed during the early years of this century. These were people who felt
themselves and the future of their children threatened. In Britain members of the upper middle class feared they
would be swamped and taxed to extinction by the profligate overbreeding of the lower orders. In the U.S., members
of the Wasp ascendancy looked with dismay at the flood of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Italians!
Poles! What was the country coming to?
Less amusing is the number of intellectuals, businessmen and political leaders who gave eugenics their
blessing or fervid support. The list begins with Darwin, who in The Descent of Man praised his cousin
Galton and decreed that genius "tends to be inherited." Other champions included the young Winston
Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Alexander Graham Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Theodore Roosevelt and
the usually taciturn Calvin Coolidge, who declared during his vice presidency that "Nordics deteriorate
when mixed with other races."
Eugenics was not just gassy theories. Impressed by the pseudo science, many U.S. states enacted laws
requiring the sterilization of those held in custody who were deemed to suffer from hereditary defects. In
1927 the U.S. Supreme Court heard an appeal of Virginia's decision in Buck v. Bell to sterilize Carrie Buck,
an institutionalized 17-year-old whom the state had decreed a "moral imbecile," the daughter of a
"feebleminded" mother and the mother herself of a daughter who was found to be, at age seven months,
subnormal in intelligence. The court, by an 8-to-1 vote, rejected Buck's appeal. In his majority opinion,
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to
cover cutting the Fallopian tubes," and concluded, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
Nowhere, of course, were eugenic theories more enthusiastically codified into binding state doctrine than in Nazi
Germany. In 1933 Adolf Hitler's government adopted the Eugenic Sterilization Law. Formulated by the Reich
Ministry of the Interior, this edict ordered the compulsory sterilization of all German citizens-- not simply those in
custody or institutions--who displayed symptoms of a number of presumptively hereditary afflictions, including
blindness, schizophrenia and offensive physical deformities. Government officials countered potential objections
about the cruelty of this measure by asserting that personal sacrifices would serve the common weal. "We go beyond Page | 30
neighborly love," said one. "We extend it to future generations. Therein lies the high ethical value and justification
of the law." As Kevles notes, the Nazis' draconian eugenics program did not originally encompass the anti-Semitism
that later so rabidly characterized the Third Reich. But as Hitler and his regime turned ever more fiercely against the
Jews, the sterilization of "undesirables" escalated into genocide, a horrifying realization of Francis Galton's vision of
the world biologically cleansed according to one group's idea of human improvement.
The Wellborn science

Sander L. Gilman
Interest in the international eugenics movement has exploded in the past few years. All are linked by
international claims to the validity of the new science of racial improvement, but each reads it in very different
ways. For German eugenics seemed (at least in the late nineteenth century) as preoccupied with population
growth as it was with racial improvement.
Eugenics and the Jew

Sir Francis Galton
The Jewish Chronicle, July 29, 1910
Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), the brilliant creator of the science of modern statistics who coined the term
eugenics, is also universally recognized as the father of the eugenics movement. The following interview is
characteristic of the largely cordial and respectful relations that existed up until the late 1960s between the Jewish
community and eugenists, a not insignificant number of whom were themselves Jewish. The interview is reprinted
here as an historical document. For more information on the topic see the free online book Future Human
Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century
John Glad
University of Maryland
The word eugenics will forever be associated with the name of Sir Francis Galton, who has devoted a long life to
the pursuance of a high ideal that of improving the fitness of the human race and to striving to secure that children
born into the world shall be well born in the sense that they shall not start life handicapped at the outset by physical
defects due to the imperfect health or physique of their progenitors. It may be said that from the day of Moses Jews
have been eugenists apart from the hygienic laws enjoined in the Mosaic Code, which affect the individual rather
than a race. The intense love of children, and the idealisation of home-life have contributed in a notable degree to
the production of a race that has withstood greater trials and tribulations than have befallen any other race in history.
A representative of The JEWISH CHRONICLE recently visited Sir Francis, who is now in his eighty-ninth year, to
seek his views concerning the bearing of eugenics on the Jewish race and the life of the Jewish people.
The Mosaic Code and Eugenics.
How would you define eugenics? was our representatives first question.
It is the study, Sir Francis replied, of the conditions under human control which improve or impair the inborn
characteristics of the race.
American Eugenics and the Nazis:

Recent Historiography, Paul Crook.
Until recently the history textbook view of eugenics gave the impression that, outside Germany and especially in the
Anglo-American world, the movement went into almost terminal decline during the 1930s. This was supposedly due
to popular perceptions of a linkage between eugenics and the excesses of the Nazis, together with other factors: the
most important being the rise of a more sophisticated genetics that undermined the scientific basis of eugenics, and
the resurgence of culturist rather than hereditarian social theories. Questioning of this received view has
intensified over the last two decades. Eugenics, it now appears, was more pervasive, more resistant to scientific
criticism, more ingrained into contemporary structures and massive issues of race, demography, welfare and gender Page | 31
than previously recognized. As one observer puts it: Eugenics was a fundamental aspect of some of the most
important cultural and social movements of the twentieth century, intimately linked to ideologies of race, nation,
and sex, inextricably meshed with population control, social hygiene, state hospitals, and the welfare state.
Having said that, it is still true that the historical reality of eugenics was diverse, multivalent and complex.
The more confrontationist and activist tone of American eugenics has been explained in terms of a greater perceived
threat to the racial purity of the hegemonic white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, middle to upper classes. This threat
was seen to come from a large black population, and from massive migration into the United States by European
Jews and Catholics after 1900.
The Germans were impressed by Americas anti-immigration and anti-miscegenation laws. In this sense, Proctor
argues, even of the early Nazi period, German racial hygiene followed the American lead. In turn Laughlin,
Davenport and other American eugenists became envious of the thoroughness with which the Nazis implemented
their race measures. One member of Davenports eugenics institute in Cold Spring Harbor remarked that Hitler
should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Record
Office! Hitler had in fact been an early admirer of American eugenics. He regarded Madison Grants The Passing
of the Great Race as his bible; and his Mein Kampf, 1924, praised the Immigration Restriction Act for excluding
undesirables on the basis of hereditary illness and race. He took a close interest in the sterilization laws of the
American states.
Legal brief:
life unworthy of life
The purpose was to weed out excess or unnecessary people who were non-productive. The term used by the
Nazi doctors for these people was life unworthy of life. It was borrowed from a medical book written in 1920 and
became the phrase that allowed physicians to conduct horrible experiments on human beings and decide who would
live and who would die. Life unworthy of life also best captures the heart of the Nazi philosophy toward the Jews
and other unfortunate groups who became the victims of the Third Reich.
As early as 1933, respected physicians were involved in a program of sterilization - making people incapable of
reproducing. The victims of this program were people whom the doctors decided were mentally deficient. The
doctors endorsement of this program then led to their support of the Nazi proposal for the killing of mentally and/or
physically handicapped children, and then mentally and/or physically handicapped adults in the so-called
euthanasia program.
Euthanasia is usually defined as mercy killing. In Germany, in 1933, the term was applied to people who were
considered unworthy of life. The doctors believed that mental illness, drunkenness, other mental and physical
disabilities could be passed on genetically. What mattered most to them was the so-called health of the Aryan
race. Consequently they saw it as their duty to remove those who would, according to their theories, weaken the
race through reproduction.
Over 450,000 people were sterilized or killed in special institutes and through and hospitals before the program was
ended. These places were often equipped with gas chambers.
After 1941, a state policy of euthanasia and forced sterilization easily changed into a state policy for mass murder.
This policy was carried out in death camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz. Those subjected to gassing in the
euthanasia program during the 1930s were said to have received special treatment, Sonderbehandlung. The
same phrase would be used as a euphemism, a substitute word to hide the real meaning, to refer to gassing of Jews
in death camps. The doctors who had formerly worked in the special hospitals of the euthanasia and sterilization
programs now appeared at the death camps. The first step for them was to assist the SS commandants of camps to
reduce the excess population of their camps. But soon, doctors like Dr. Mengele, his superior, Dr. Wirths, or the
internationally known Dr. Clauberg were selecting people as guinea pigs for horrible experiments.
How did thousands of medical doctors become involved with the murder of the Jews? Were they forced? Were they
threatened? Or did they truly believe the racial theories of the Nazis?
German doctors were not forced to participate in the sterilization, the euthanasia or the mass murder programs.
They were not threatened if they refused (as some did). Some seemed to have believed in the Nazi genetic theories.
Many tried to impress their superiors or gain favor with politically powerful Nazis by doing research about breeding
a super-race (biological engineering). Rarely had doctors had such opportunities for human experimentation. To
experiment with animals and write or lecture about it was one thing, but to experiment directly on humans was quite
another - a shortcut to acclaim and a more glamorous type of research.
All hoped to advance their careers; a few were fanatical Nazis.
The second explanation concerning the behavior of the doctors is related to the concept of the Volksgemeinschaft or
racial community, the Aryan race. The Volksgemeinschaft was defined as a single body, and parasites or
infections like Gypsies, Jews and other were said to weaken it. The doctors described the Volksgemeinschaft as their
most important patient. The removal of undesirables from that patient was the primary method used to
guarantee its health. The doctors of the Third Reich claimed that mental illness, drunkenness, ugliness, body
disfigurement and other mental and physical disorders were hereditary. They also claimed that forms of behavior
could be inherited. According to the definitions of Jews in laws passed in 1933, 1934 and 1935, Jewishness was also
hereditary. All these genetic theories allowed medical murder to proceed.
Advancing careers, abandoning all previous standards of behavior, belief in racial theories, total support from the
authorities and no opposition from any leading scientific or medical institution all contributed to the doctors
participation in the Final Solution. These same elements made it easier for those in other professions to
participate, too. Such behavior, by civilized and educated people, could not occur because of their failure to
recognize the value of life for all human beings.
The key to the medical involvement in mass murder seems to have been the phrase life unworthy of life. These
men (and women) perceived their victims as less than human or as objects - dead matter. Life unworthy of life
may summarize Auschwitz, the death camps, the Holocaust.
Legal brief: life unworthy of life
All too often destroying the Semitic or Semitism meant in reality destroying not just the Semitic spirit or the
essence of Semitism, but rather Jewishness itself, or even the physical carriers of the Semitic/ Jewish spirit, the
Jews themselves, whether by exclusion, expulsion or extermination. In Germany the debate on the destruction of
Judaism had been carried on since Kant in highly ambiguous language which usually rendered opaque whether the
destruction of Judentum (meaning Jewry, Judaism, or Jewishness, or Jews in an emotional and undifferentiated
way) should involve a spiritual and metaphorical destruction or something more uncomfortably physical.25 Renans
concepts of Semitism and Semitic race and religion, therefore, when translated into the contemporary German
cultural debates, became highly explosive and inflammatory, and dangerous.
Renan ... His challenging lecture of 1883 on Judaism as Race and Religion insisted that Jews were biologically
integrated into the French race itself. First, he pointed out the infusion of Jewish blood that had taken place in
ancient and medieval times, so that the French, like all modern European races, had become a mixed race. And there
had been a similar infusion of French blood into the Jewish race: I do not believe that many Jews in the Roman
epoch were so fanatical as not to show the road to those not of their religion.
What does the rest matter? There is no immaculate history. The history of the Jewish people is one of the most
beautiful there is, and I do not regret having devoted my life to it [. . .]. The movement away from paganism in the
first centuries of our era saw a host of conversions of people of delicate religious feelings. The greatest number of
conversions was certainly to Christianity, but a very large number were also to Judaism. Most of the Jews of Gaul
and Italy resulted from such conversions [. . .] though with the danger [of dissolving into Christianity] there was a
Page | 32
reaction by the Talmud which caused proselytism to disappear [. . .]. But before that, I repeat, the gates [to Judaism]
had been wide open [. . .]. There were many Jews at Paris, Orleans, Clermont at the time of Gregory of Tours [. . .].
Where did these Jews of Orleans and Paris come from? Can we suppose they were descended of Orientals arrived
from Palestine? I do not think so. There were immigrant Jews [. . .] but the Jew of Gaulish France was probably
most often only a Gaul professing Israelite religion [. . .]. I am convinced that in the mass of the Jewish population
which exists in our time there is a considerable portion of non-Semitic blood, so that this race, considered the ideal
of a pure race maintaining itself over the centuries by the prohibition of mixed marriages, has been strongly
penetrated by foreign infusions [. . .]. My opinion is that there is no single Jewish type, but rather Jewish types, each
absolutely irreducible to another.
The transformation of France by the Revolution of 1789 that the Third Republic was now consolidating into a
modern and rational nation demanded the full emancipation of the Jews: Let us rejoice, gentlemen, that these
questions, so interesting for history and ethnography, have no practical importance in France [. . .]. In questions of
nationality, we make the question of race a quite secondary question, quite rightly. Ethnographic reality, crucial for
the origins of history, has steadily lost its importance as civilisation has advanced. When the National Assembly in
1791 decreed the emancipation of the Jews, it scarcely considered race.
The task of the 19th century is to demolish the ghettoes and I do not congratulate those who seek to rebuild them.
The Jewish race has rendered to the world the greatest services. Assimilated into different nations, in harmony with
diverse unified nations, it will continue to do in the future what it has done in the past. Through its collaboration
with the liberal forces of Europe, the Jewish race will contribute eminently to the social progress of humanity.
This is not to say that Renan was ever able (any more than, say, Matthew Arnold) to escape completely the
conditioning of his thought by prejudiced German cultural constructions of Aryan and Semite, as was evidenced
occasionally even in his later writings by references to Jewish cowardice, lack of honour, greed and amorality. But
most of these references need to be understood in the context of the authors character and intellectual intent. Take,
for example, an apparently antisemitic passage in the third volume of his History of Israel (1887-1893) condemning
the Jews scorn for, and yet dependence on, the civil-military state:
Colonialism, Antisemitism,
and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany
Christian S. Davis
An exploration of anti-Semitic behaviors in the German empire in the pre-WWI period
Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany
Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany examines the relationship between
the colonial and antisemitic movements of modern Germany from 1871 to 1918, examining the complicated ways in
which German antisemitism and colonialism fed off of and into each other in the decades before the First World
War. Author Christian S. Davis studies the significant involvement with and investment in German colonialism by
the major antisemitic political parties and extra-parliamentary organizations of the day, while also investigating the
prominent participation in the colonial movement of Jews and Germans of Jewish descent and their tense
relationship with procolonial antisemites.
Working from the premise that the rise and propagation of racial antisemitism in late-nineteenth-century Germany
cannot be separated from the context of colonial empire, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish
Descent in Imperial Germany is the first work to study the dynamic and evolving interrelationship of the colonial
and antisemitic movements of the Kaiserreich era. It shows how individuals and organizations who originated what
would later become the ideological core of National Socialism- racial anti-Semitism - both influenced and perceived
the development of a German colonial empire predicated on racial subjugation. It also examines how colonialism
affected the contemporaneous German antisemitic movement, dividing it over whether participation in the
nationalist project of empire building could furnish patriotic credentials to even Germans of Jewish descent. The
book builds upon the recent upsurge of interest among historians of modern Germany in the domestic impact and

Page | 33
character of German colonialism, and on the continuing fascination with the racialization of the German sense of
self that became so important to German history in the twentieth century.
"The major contribution of Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany lies
precisely in linking colonialism with antisemitism, which no one has done up to now. It will influence how scholars
think about the long-term continuities and ruptures in German history."
Shelley Baranowski, University of Akron
Racial Science, Social Science, and the Politics of Jewish Assimilation
Mitchell B. Hart
Well before the first decade of the twentieth century, the "sick-ness of Jewry" had become more than a metaphor.
The "Jewish body," both individual and collective, was something that, for many Jews as well as non-Jews, was
diseased and degenerate, an entity that literally required healing. The importance of this image of the diseased
Jewish body and of "the Jew" as an object of scientific research and popular representation for the anti-Semitic
imagination is well known and fairly well documented. Indeed, when we think about Jews and racial theories of
health and disease, we are accustomed to thinking about the Jews first as objects of a largely anti-Semitic racial
science and then as victims-primarily of a Nazi regime fueled to a significant degree by that science.'
Without downplaying the significance of racial anti-Semitism, this essay seeks to show that the history of racial
science vis-a-vis the Jews is more complex and convoluted. Historians have demonstrated that racial science and
eugenics were ideologically heterogeneous into the 1920s, even the 1930s. A racialized interpretation of history and
contemporary social problems was by no means the provenance of right-wing conservatives and anti-Semites alone.
Eugenics, for instance, was at various times touted by liberals, socialists, and feminists as "progressive." There was
no necessary or essential connection be-tween a strong belief in the reality and import of race and any one particular
ideological position.
Nor was a belief in the reality and importance of racial identities and differences, and an involvement in research
into these matters, confined to one particular ethnic or religious group. Although some Jewish writers were
addressing themselves to issues such as Jewish health and disease already in the late eighteenth century, it was in the
half century or so between 1880 and 1930 that Jewish scholars and popular writers became especially engaged in the
debates over racial identity and difference, heredity and environment. Thus by 1906 Arthur Ruppin, a prominent
Jewish social scientist and the head of the Bureau for Jewish Statistics in Berlin, could assert that "almost all
inquiries into the social, intellectual, and physical differences between Jews and Christians address the question of
whether these differences have their root in the particular racial makeup or in the unique economic and political
conditions of the Jews over the past two thousand years. One might designate this question, in fact, as the
fundamental problem or issue of social scientific research about the Jews."
Ruppin was speaking here not only about the literature produced by non-Jewish authorities, but also about the
growing body of work emanating from Jewish demographers, anthropologists, and physicians. Contemporary Jewry
was thus an object of scholarly research undertaken by Jews; the inquiry into the racial identity and health of the
Jews became a central component of a developing Jewish social science that sought to understand and explain
modem Jewry by using social scientific knowledge and methods. It broadened the definition of a Jewish
Wissenschaft (science or scholarship), shifting the focus of research away from Judaism and its past and onto Jewry
in the present. Social scientific analyses of the condition of modem Jewry became, in turn, part of the contemporary
debate about fundamental political and ideological matters: civic emancipation, integration and assimilation, antiSemitism, and Jewish nationalism.
Mitchell B. Hart
Science, it is important to note, did not speak about the Jews univocally. The narrative was not stable or
essentialized; that is, the discourse of Western science, including medicine, vis-a-vis the Jews as objects of research
and analysis was heterogeneous. For many, of course, there did exist an essential Jewish nature, more often than not
cast in negative, even dangerous, terms. According to the German anthropologist Richard Andree, the Jews were
Page | 34
important for science because "one can trace them with certainty over thousands of years, and no other racial type
has maintained such constant form and remained as immune to time and space.... The ancient Jewish physical and
mental structures have remained constant." This notion of an essential, immutable Jewish body and soul, unchanged
over the millennia, was a commonplace in the anthropological and medical literature.4T he political and social
message of this immutable Jewish nature was clear: the "Jewish body" was racially different and pathological, and
opponents of Jewish emancipation and assimilation were correct in insisting that Jews were unfit to be part of a
healthy modem nation-state.5 (See Figures 1 and 2.)
To be sure, it would be in Central Europe that this struggle against Jewish emancipation and integration would
eventually succeed, with the most horrific consequences. However, as we shall see, this struggle was by no means
limited to Central Europe in the decades before the rise of Nazism. Jews in France, England, and the United States,
for instance, also confronted an increasingly vocal and organized anti-Semitism, oftentimes framed in racial
scientific terms. Yet the scientific literature produced about the Jews included not only negative but also
There was no fixed or uniform image of the "Jewish race" and its status or value vis-'a-vis other "races."6M ore
specifically, as the passage from Ruppini llustrates, there was an ongoing debate, which lasted well into the 1920s,
over what the medico-anthropological data revealed about two fundamental issues: identity and causality. Were the
Jews a religious community? A nation? A race? Just as significantly: If a race, could Jews be defined as a "purer
ace"? And what accounts for particular or "peculiar" Jewish traits, if one agreed that such things did exist? Were the
Jews a product of nature or nurture, biology or environment? Was their susceptibility to or immunity from particular
diseases genetically determined? Or could these be explained by a host of historical and contemporary social factors,
including persecution, the adverse living conditions of the ghetto, and the "unhealthy" effects of orthodox religious
laws and customs'? The heterogeneous nature of the scientific discourse about Jews allowed Jewish scientists to
fashion responses out of elements drawn from this same scientific discourse, to construct their own narratives of
"Jewish race," health, and disease. Especially important in this regard was the "environmentalist" explanation for
anatomical and physiological traits, which emphasized historical and social forces as determinative and embraced
the concept of acquired traits or characteristics. By the late nineteenth century the theory of acquired traits had come
to be associated almost exclusively with the early eighteenth-century French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarckthough, as commentators point out, the notion of acquired traits was already universally accepted when Lamarck
utilized it. Lamarckism posited a tight connection between an organism and its surroundings and explained
evolutionary transformation in an organism as a direct response to environmental conditions or challenges. In order
to maintain (or regain) equilibrium or harmony with its particular environment, a species will adapt, either by using
individual organs or limbs more frequently and thereby strengthening and enlarging them or by developing new
parts to meet the new conditions. The anatomical and physiological changes that occurred as a result of this process
of adaptation were, according to this theory, heritable. Significant structural changes, necessitated by environmental
challenges, in turn produce transformations at the genetic level. New or altered structures become part of what is
inherited by subsequent generations.
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

A Cultural History of Heredity III: 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Lamarckism, as it came to be formulated in the late nineteenth century, was associated almost exclusively with this
notion of acquired characteristics, or "soft inheritance." This theory brought Lamarckians into conflict with
Mendelians and supporters of August Weismann's germ plasm theory. While Mendelian genetics, of course,
eventually proved the more satisfactory theory, the dispute was by no means settled by the first decades of this
century. Neither the ascendancy of Darwin's theory of natural selection nor the rediscovery of Mendel's laws of
inheritance meant the demise of the notion of acquired traits. As Ludmilla Jordanovah as written, for decades after
1900, indeed as late as the 1950s, "prominent biologists continued to defend Lamarck's biological philosophy of the
inheritance of acquired characteristics."
Certainly, during the period in which Jewish social scientists were relying so heavily upon this sort of
environmentalist argument the theory was a legitimate, if contested, one within the scientific community. Jewish
social scientists, however, were by no means entirely consistent in their adoption of this sort of environmentalism.
They could, at times, put forth ideas and images of Jewry that relied on essentialist notions, making use of evidence
Page | 35
found in the work of writers like Andree. Nonetheless, Jewish social scientists did rely heavily on a Lamarckian
environmentalism, so much so that in some circles adherence to Lamarckian theory itself came to be identified as
"Jewish." And the theory of acquired traits did serve Jewish social scientists' purposes nicely. It allowed them, in the
first place, to explain the particular physical or mental traits often identified as racially Jewish as historically or
socially determined. This was an attempt to undermine an explanatory framework that relied on an overly rigid
biological determinism of the sort that undergirded a racialized anti-Semitism aimed at limiting or reversing the civil
and social rights attained by Jews over the course of the nineteenth century and restricting the number of Jewish
Page | 36
immigrants coming from the Russian Empire. The politics of anti-Semitism assumed different shapes in different
countries, each with its own political tradition vis-a-vis Jews and other minority groups. Nonetheless, in
fundamental respects the scientific discourse on race and disease was international, and one finds the same or similar
images and ideas circulating in academic texts produced in every language in which scientists wrote."

Mitchell B. Hart
Since the "international" anti-Jewish discourse that emerged in the last half of the nineteenth century employed the
methods and categories of the social sciences, Jews trained in these disciplines were particularly well equipped to
respond. Like other minority groups, such as blacks and women, Jews sought to insert themselves into the dominant
narrative of science as a means of both identification with and differentiation from the dominant narrative and
culture. So Jewish social scientists, it is important to note, were not necessarily averse to the idea that one could
locate Jewish difference or particularity at the physiological level. They did not altogether disavow the notion of
"race" as a category applicable to the Jews. Moreover, they accepted, to different degrees, the conjunction of
"Jewish" and "diseased." As we shall see, they agreed with many non- Jewish authorities that, statistically, Jews
suffered to a greater extent from a host of identifiable physical and mental disorders. The ability and need to analyze
contemporary Jewry in social scientific terms, during a period in which the social sciences were profoundly
influenced by a racialized biology and medicine and in which anti-Semites employed this same scientific discourse,
meant that the Jewish and anti-Semitic analyses overlapped in significant ways. Thus even as Jewish social scientists
sought to dispel the dominant image of the Jews as diseased, and therefore eugenically dangerous, they put forth
many of these same notions.
As Sander Gilman and Nancy Leys Stepan have pointed out, in resisting or rejecting the racial and social scientific
discourse about Jews, Jewish scientists perforce had to accept this dis-course as well: As Jews (and other groups
stereotyped in the biological and social sciences of the day) were drawn more deeply into the sciences of racial
difference, whether in measuring themselves as a race by craniometry and other methods, or by comparing one
fraction of the Jewish "race" with another, or by commenting on or contesting the thesis of Jewish pathology and
illness, they were tempted simultaneously to embrace and reject the field: to embrace science's methods, concepts,
and the promise it held out for discovering knowledge, and to reject, in a variety of ways, the conclusions of science
as they appeared to apply negatively to themselves. Thus for Jewish social scientists the discourse on race presented
both challenge and opportunity. As scientists, educated in central and western European universities, they
internalized a body of literature that took physical and mental pathologies as signs of a collective identity and
difference, reading normalcy or abnormality at the social, national, and racial levels. The social and medical
sciences had been used to identify the Jewish body and mind as diseased and degenerate. As Jews, identified with
their community or Volk, these scientists felt compelled to respond in some way to the increasingly widespread
image of the diseased and dangerous Jew.
Yet it would be a mistake to view their interest and involvement in the social sciences solely in reactive terms.
Physical anthropology, social and racial hygiene, and demography also offered Jewish social scientists a new
language with which to redefine Jewish collective identity at a time when, among Jews and non-Jews alike, this
identity was highly contested. Moreover, the environmentalist tradition within the social sciences opened up the
possibility of progressive, meliorative change at the collective level. It allowed Jewish social scientists to fill the
roles of apologist and reformer, to defend their own people from attacks by anti-Semites and offer suggestions for
self-improvement based on the knowledge and insights of science. The possibilities of reform and regeneration were
conceived along a number of different and competing political and ideological lines, impelled by conflicts and
debates both be-tween representatives of Jewry and the non-Jewish world and among factions within Jewry itself.
The positions taken by Jewish researchers were driven in large measure by ideological commitments and political
goals. More specifically, the debate between Jewish social scientists in Europe and the United States over the nature
and condition of modem Jewry was carried on between Zionists and integrationists. Zionists were Jewish
nationalists who rejected, at the ideological level at least, the integration or assimilation of the Jews into the broader
culture and society. Integrationists were those who continued to champion such goals. The images, ideas, and
statistics generated about Jewish bodies and minds were embedded in narratives that sought to make a persuasive
ideological or political point. The politics of a social scientific representation of Jewish racial identity and health can Page | 37
be explained in part as emerging out of particular national or local conditions; but they also derived from
transnational or international concerns, ideological and intellectual debates and conflicts not limited to any one
country. Particular national or more local contexts are of course important in determining the shape and direction
that ideas take; just as significant, however, is the intertextuality of developing discourses, the way in which writers
draw upon and respond to previous and contemporary scholarship. Of course, the form and content of scholarship
oftentimes transcend geographic boundaries. This essay therefore takes a comparative approach, focusing on the
multiple, mutually related contexts within which the social scientific debate over the nature of modern Jewish
identity emerged and on the political impetus to this scholarship.

Mitchell B. Hart
Zionist social scientists, while by no means monolithic in opinion, agreed that the statistical and anecdotal evidence
about contemporary Jewry demonstrated that, in the first place, the Jews were indeed a nation (united in the past and
present by common racial traits, among other things) and that, second, acculturation and assimilation had had
disastrous effects on the "Jewish body." Zionists embraced the definition of Jewry as a Volk (often-times using the
term Rasse, "race," in a descriptive way) and biomedical analyses of the Jewish condition as empirical proof of just
such an identity.' Physiological traits or conditions provided Zionists with what they believed to be objective
markers or signs of peoplehood. Anthropology offered anatomical evidence of difference; medicine established
identity and difference through the discourse on pathology. Moreover, the discourse of disease and degeneration
provided the framework within which to construct a Jewry in need of nationalist regeneration. This interest in
questions of Jewish racial identity and, more especially, the anxious concern over the health of the "Jewish body"
mirrored more general anxieties expressed by social scientists, reformers, and social critics during this period. The
notion of degeneration -at the individual, social, national, and racial levels-emerged in the latter half of the
nineteenth century as one of the dominant models of explanation for the host of "social pathologies" believed to be
plaguing societies.
For some Zionists, Jewish degeneration was to be found exclusively in eastern Europe, among the masses of
Ghettojuden. In 1900, for instance, Max Mandelstamm, a prominent Russian Zionist, delivered a speech before the
Fourth Zionist Congress in London on "the physical amelioration of Jewry." Mandelstamm had studied medicine at
Khartov University and ophthalmology at the University of Berlin. When he returned to Russia from Germany he
ran an eye clinic in Kiev, and it was there in the 1880s that he became active in Zionism. In his speech
Mandelstamm made a point of limiting himself to an analysis of the Ostjuden, or eastern European Jews. For it was
in the East, he insisted, that one could locate "Jewish degeneration." Mandelstamm set out to demonstrate "that the
decrepit, miserable, weak bodily constitution of the Jews of the ghetto is the exclusive result of their wretched social
and economic situation."' He acknowledged that the Jewish masses ought to be characterized as "degenerate," but he
embraced an environmental rather than racial explanation for the condition. In almost every way, he claimed, the
Jews compared unfavorably with "normally developed people." Jewish height on average (162 cm) was lower than
that of non-Jews (165-170 cm); their limbs were shorter, their chests and muscles less well developed. They were
susceptible to all sorts of diseases, suffering disproportionately from tuberculosis, numerous skin ailments, and eye
diseases such as trachoma and nearsightedness. Jewish women suffered from particular women's disorders in greater
numbers than their non-Jewish counterparts. Nor were Jews especially immune to certain diseases, as a popular
notion had it. "As far as so-called immunities of Jews against known epidemic dis-eases, such as pestilence or
cholera in the Middle Ages, this is foolish drivel from an earlier time. No one today would seriously try to justify
such unfounded claims."'

However, Mandelstamm modified this point moments later, all but accepting the "foolish" notion he had just
ridiculed. If Jews did display a marked ability to resist disease (Widerstandsfahigkeit), this was due not to any racial
peculiarity but, rather, to their moderation in food and drink, their adherence to hygienic laws, and their greater
willingness to consult physicians. In particular, their general abstinence from alcohol allowed Jews to resist infection
to a greater degree than non-Jews. Yet sadly, he informed his listeners, this ability to resist disease had been
decreasing in recent times, as the "better-off Jews assimilate into the non-Jewish population" and adopt their
excessive behavior. The end of Jewish isolation, the integration of Jews into the larger society, would therefore lead Page | 38
not to health but to the loss of whatever positive attributes Jews already possessed. In contrast to their poorly
developed bodies, Mandelstamm argued, Jews possessed larger than average brains."
Weak muscles, badly developed respiratory organs, weak bone structure, slight physical strength, little capacity for
physical labor. Only the skull is highly developed among them; the cranial capacity of the Jew is on average greater
than that of the non-Jewish population." In line with nineteenth-century scientific materialism, Mandelstamm
assumed a direct relation between the size and shape of the cranium and mental prowess. Their larger cranial
capacity, established by the numerous craniometric studies of anthropologists, indicated the greater average
intelligence of the Jews.
What was the impact of emancipation and, even more, assimilation? Zionists were less interested in the impact of
Jewish assimilation on the general society than in its effects on the character of the Jews them-selves. The
conclusions they reached were, on the whole, less than sanguine. The Viennese physician Martin Englander, for
instance, revealed a link between assimilation and degeneration in his 1902 study on "the startling frequency of
illness among the Jewish race." Englander found proof of this connection in statistics showing comparatively higher
rates of mental and nervous disorders, alcoholism, and suicide among middle-class western European Jews. Hugo
Hoppe, another physician, and at the time a noted authority on alcoholism, argued much the same thing in his
writings on Jews, alcoholism, and disease. Hoppe cited statistics that showed a marked increase in physical and
mental disorders, as well as criminality, among assimilated Jews. This he attributed to the assimilation of modern,
gentile mores, chief among them the increasing consumption of alcohol (a path-ology, he insisted, to which Jewish
academics were especially prone). Thus emancipation and assimilation threatened to efface the identity and unity of
Jews assumed to have existed before the modernization process took hold. In breaking down the social, economic,
and physical barriers between Jews and non-Jews (labeled at times "Christians," a t times "Aryans") that had been in
place for centuries, the forces of modernity posed the greatest danger to Jewish survival. Arthur Ruppin argued that
the significance of increasing rates of Jewish conversion and intermarriage lay in its negative "anthropological" or
"racial" effect. Ruppin was not only a leading social scientific authority on Jews but also an important Zionist
administrator. After resigning as head of the Bureau for Jewish Statistics in 1907 he moved to Palestine to become
head of the World Zionist Organization's Palestine office.
Mitchell B. Hart
In books and articles published between 1904 and 1940 he developed a comprehensive and sophisticated social
scientific approach to modern Jewish life, focusing on the physical as well as social effects of assimilation. While he
was firmly wedded to a sociological, or social determinist, position, Ruppin was nonetheless strongly influenced by
current bioracial thinking. Assimilation, he insisted, adversely affected modern Jewry at the physical as well as the
cultural and spiritual level. "The number of Jews," he wrote in The Jews of Today (1904), "whose facial
physiognomy displays none of the traits of the so-called Jewish type, whose morphological type cannot be identified
as of Jewish descent is substantial." The high level of "racial mixing" (Ras-senvermischung) that occurred during the
nineteenth century in the West meant that physically, or anthropologically, eastern and western European Jews were
more and more different types. For Ruppin, this represented the possibility of an extreme, even absolute, division or
chasm between the two Jewries. "Therewith the last bridge, racial unity, connecting eastern and western Jewry,
divided as they are already culturally, will be destroyed. And since their bond with eastern European Jewry has
vanished and they stand alone, the absorption of western European Jewry will happen quite easily." Assimilation,
for Ruppin as for most Zionist social scientists, was directly responsible for the pathological, abnormal condition of
modern Jewry. More precisely, they saw a causal connection between material and social progress and physical and
mental pathologies. Reflecting a broader antibourgeois animus that pervaded much of early Zionist ideology, they
rejected the notion that political and social freedom, together with higher (i.e., middle class) living standards, would
produce a "healthy Jew."
Precisely the opposite. Ruppin, for instance, argued that through the Jews' increasingly intensive participation in the
modem economy, in science, art, and higher education, the areas of contact between Jews and Christians were
becoming ever greater. As a result, the sense of be-longing to the Jewish Volk was disappearing. This, in turn, must
lead to an increase in intermarriage and conversion, further lowering the number of Jews. Ruppin's analysis was
echoed by a number of other Zionist social scientists at the time. The Austrian physician and Zionist Ignaz Zollschan
concluded that "the only protection against intermarriage, as with conversion, in the Diaspora is the ghetto. In
countries where Jews take part in public and economic life as equals, intermarriage is continuously on the rise. This Page | 39
is most frequently the case in the large cities." Zollschan viewed this as the most serious threat facing modern Jewry,
speaking of assimilation in terms of "racial suicide." Just as important, the higher rates of intermarriage negatively
affected the physical, racial makeup of Jewry. While Zionist social scientists disagreed among themselves about
whether the Jews constituted a "pure race," they nonetheless shared the belief that inter-marriage posed a threat to
the racial quality as well as the numerical quantity of contemporary Jewry. Intermarriage, and to a lesser extent
proselytism (the conversion of non- Jews to Judaism), introduced "foreign blood" into the collective Jewish body,
with deleterious effects.
In a 1905 article entitled "Mixed Marriages," the editors of the American Zionist journal the Maccabbean asserted
that "the mixed marriage is more tolerable from a religious than from a racial standpoint." Clearly working with a
bioracial, rather than a religious, definition of Jewish identity or "Jewishness," the writers denied that genuine
conversion was even possible. True, both Christianity and Judaism have rituals whereby, for instance, a Christian
man becomes a Jew and participates to whatever degree in the life of the synagogue and the Jewish home; or a
Jewish woman marries a Christian man and takes on the sacraments of the church. To the nationalist, however,
"both these conditions are mere theories: he cannot really become a Jew, she cannot really cease to be a Jewess."
Echoing the findings of Jewish social scientists, the writers argued that intermarriage produced both a quantitative
and a qualitative loss for the Jewish people. Jewry, like other nations, is dependent on numerical strength. "We have
survived because our birth rate has always been so well ahead of our death rate." Yet intermarriage yields children
who, in most cases, will be raised as non-Jews. Not every prominent Zionist writer who utilized social scientific
categories shared this antibourgeois bias. The well-known cultural critic and Zionist leader Max Nordau, for
example, did a great deal to disseminate the notion that abnormality was the defining characteristic of modern
Jewish existence. For Nordau, who trained as a physician, physical degeneration, manifested in the deformed and
weak Jewish body, was one of the clearest signs of this abnormal condition. However, Nordau's conception of
"healthy" and "normal" stemmed in large measure from bourgeois norms. Following his teacher, the criminal
anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, he defined normalcy as the middle: the moral, cultural, social, and aesthetic area
between the depths of the criminal and insane and the heights of genius.
Jacobs, whose work tended much more toward apologia than toward critique and reform, posited, for the most part,
a healthy, even superior, Jewish body and mind. However, as I argued earlier, Jewish social scientists more often
focused on the negative attributes and qualities of contemporary Jewry; this was as true for integrationists as for
Zionists. Unlike the Zionists, however, integrationists made the case for assimilation as an agent of Jewish health
and normalcy. Integration facilitated positive transformation at the physical and biological levels, and this
transformation in turn was the sign or indication of assimilation's success. The Zionist and integrationist interpretive
frameworks were similar in significant ways. Both conceded that segments of Jewry were "inferior"- that is,
physically (and by extension culturally) enfeebled, suffering in disproportionate numbers from certain diseases. And
both relied on a strong environmental determinism in which the physical and moral character of the Jews would be
transformed through an encounter with new, healthy surroundings. They differed in their ideas about where such a
transformation could and should occur and in their evaluations of the effects of isolation from or assimilation into
the larger non-Jewish community. For instance, the German-Jewish health official (Sanitdtsrat) and head of the
communal organization Bnei Brith, Louis Maretzki, believed that the Jews suffered from certain degenerative
illnesses, particularly nervous and mental disorders. He, too, stressed the environmental over the racial origins of
this degeneration. Yet for Maretzki the "cure" lay in reform at the local, communal level. He urged the Jews to
renew themselves as a community (Gemeinschaft) within Germany through greater attention to health and hygiene.
The key to such a renewal of Jewish collective health lay not in the ideal of the nation but in the family.
This concern with the physical and moral transformation of the eastern European Jew was intimately bound up with
the phenomenon of large-scale immigration and the political and cultural struggles it produced. By the last quarter of
the nineteenth century the concern over eastern and southern European immigration was being voiced not only in the
major cities of Europe but also in the United States. North American social scientists played a crucial role in the
developing debate over the nature of these immigrants and their impact on the "body" of America. Eastern and
southern European immigrants were of course not the only objects of social scientific and policy concern. Debates
over the "racial" identity and health of the nation continued to focus on the place and the impact of blacks; but the
impact of Jews and Italians was also of interest and concern. The focal point of anthropological and medical
investigations into the Jewish body was the eastern European immigrant population, which had begun arriving in
massive numbers in the 1880s. Anti-Jewish and nativist forces railed at the impoverishment, uncleanliness, and
"strange" social and cultural customs of the immigrants. By the end of the nineteenth century, when the rates of
immigration soared, a more biological and racial determinist language had also gained greater prominence, so that
Jews were increasingly described as "parasites" or "germs" and in similar terms drawn from biology and medicine.
Mitchell B. Hart
The Jews were, therefore, deemed incompatible with and unassimilable to the Anglo-Saxon race, which, it was
argued, had created and continued to define the United States. Evidence of this unassimilability was found in Jewish
anatomy and physiology, in de-formed and disease-prone bodies. This physical deformation-attributed variously to
Jewish "inbreeding" (i.e., endogamy) born of racial pride or to historical intermixture with inferior eastern or
oriental breeds (e.g., the medieval Khazars)-was genetic or biological and hence presented a grave threat to the
racial purity and health of America. Restrictionists in the decades prior to 1924, the year in which the U.S. Congress
succeeded in passing highly restrictionist legislation, referred repeatedly to the physical and moral degeneration of
Jewry and the threat these posed. For instance, at the turn of the century the racial anthropologist William Z. Ripley
wrote, in a work identified at the time as definitive in racial science, that the eastern European Jews suffered from a
"physical degeneracy" that was evident in their short stature, deficient lung capacity, and other negative traits.
Ripley warned his readers that this "great Polish swamp of miserable human beings ... threatens to drain itself off
into our country as well, unless we restrict its ingress." Manly Simons, medical director in the U.S. Navy, asserted
that "as a type Jews are beginning to show mental and physical degradation, as evidenced by the great variability of
development, great brilliancy, idiocy, moral perversity, epilepsy, physical deformity, anarchistic and lawless
tendencies
E. A. Ross, writing in 1914, insisted that "on the physical side the Hebrews are the polar opposite of our pioneer
breed. Not only are they undersized and weak muscled, but they shun bodily activity and are exceedingly sensitive
to pain." In sum, American nativists and anti-Semites, in the words of Alan Kraut, "sought to sketch the Jew as a
public health menace, one who might end up on the public relief roles in droves, deficient in the physical vitality to
stand the test of the rugged American environment, as did the pioneer forbearers of the native-born and the sturdier
stock that had emigrated to the United States from Northern and Western Europe."
It was the task of social scientists sympathetic to the goals of immigration and integration to provide the empirical,
scientific evidence for the viability of assimilation and thereby counter the nativist and anti-Semitic position.
American Jewish physicians, psychologists, and sociologists, for instance, acknowledged that Jews suffered at
disproportionately high rates from insanity, neurasthenia, and other disorders. "Step into any clinic for nervous
diseases in any large city in Europe and America," the neurologist Abraham Myerson wrote in 1920, "and the Jew is
unduly represented amongst the patients." Responding both to American nativists, who after World War I relied
increasingly on psychological data to prove the inferiority of non-Anglo-Saxon "races," and to the Zionist critique of
Jewish assimilation, Myerson and others championed assimilation as the cure for Jewish disorders.
The best means of prevention or cure, according to the psychiatrist and Freud translator A. A. Brill, in an article
titled "The Adjustment of the Jew to the American Environment, "is "a gradual process of Americanization, or
assimilation." The sociologist Charles Bernheimer, writing on Jewish health conditions in Philadelphia, conceded
that nearly all medical authorities-including Mandelstamm, Englander, Richard Krafft-Ebing, and Jean-Martin
Charcot-recognized that the Jews are prone to nervous and mental disorders; it is a "medical axiom." This
predisposition is hereditary, a "racial predisposition transmitted through generations." Nonetheless, a combination of
the will to adapt and assimilate and a healthy environment will cure the nervous Jew. "With all his proverbial
tenacity of character, the Jew, and especially the Eastern Jew, is physically and psychically extremely plastic, and
only needs a reasonably favorable environment to develop into a noble specimen of man. His energy, intelligence,
and integrity will solve many of the perplexing economic problems, and in that way the sanitary and hygienic
questions will, partly at least, be answered." Myerson, Brill, and Bernheimer spoke of a Jewish race and Jewish
Page | 40
racial traits. Yet they insisted that these traits were mutable, a product of history and environment.
Mitchell B. Hart
Page | 41
Racial Science, Social Science,

and the Politics of Jewish Assimilation
This essay examines the work of Jewish social scientists who in the first decades of this century analyzed modem
Jewish life from the perspective of anthropology and medicine. While the historiography of the social and racial
sciences has focused almost exclusively on the Jews as objects of these sciences, scholars have begun to explore the
degree to which Jews themselves were involved in social and racial scientific research about their own people.
Trained in the natural and social sciences, Jewish researchers shared the same conceptual and methodological
framework as their non-Jewish counterparts. Yet they had their own social and political agendas, and they used their
research to achieve these. This essay demonstrates that Jewish social scientists, while united in their desire to
counter scientific anti-Semitism through the use of social science, nonetheless were divided in the political or
ideological conclusions they drew from their findings. More specifically, the essay shows how anthropological and
medical analyses of Jewry were impelled by the debate between Jewish "assimilationists" and nationalists (Zionists)
over Jewish integration in modem society and culture.
Published in 1911, in forty volumes, the study "symbolized the high point of political propaganda for immigration
restriction before the immigration laws were enacted in the twenties."47 The political impulse behind Boas's
contribution, however, was antirestrictionist. He granted, as he put it in a 1908 letter, that the new immigrants
coming into the country from eastern, central, and southern Europe were different from the "tall blonde Northwestern type of European." "And the question has justly been raised, whether this change of physical type will
influence the marvelous power of amalgamation that our nation has exhibited for so long a time."
Boas suggested that the investigation "be directed towards an inquiry into 1) the assimilation or stability of type, and
2) changes in the characteristics of the development of the individual." Intensive anthropometric investigations
would re-veal the extent to which forces such as "selection" in the immigrant process, intermarriage, and
environmental changes affect bodily form over generations. If, as Boas had come to believe, environmental factors
significantly influenced the typology of immigrants, then "all fear of an unfavorable influence of South European
immigrants upon the body of our people should be dismissed."48 Boas focused his research into "changes in bodily
form" on the shape of the head, since this was taken by almost every anthropologist at the time to be the most
"stable" of anatomical traits.
In 1908 he studied young Russian-Jewish men at City College and two public high schools in New York. As George
Stocking writes, this anthropometric investigation yielded unexpected results. Rather than the stability of head form
that anthropologists took as a given, Boas found significant modifications among immigrant children. This
divergence between generations indicated that the physical and social environment exerted a marked impact on the
anatomy of these new Americans. Further anthropometric studies of Italian and Jewish immigrant skulls revealed a
plasticity of head shape that, Boas argued, demonstrated the powerful impact of environment and culture on
anatomy. The investigation has shown much more than was anticipated. There are not only decided changes in the
rate of development of immigrants, but there is also a far-reaching change in the type-a change which cannot be
ascribed to selection or mixture, but which can only be explained as due directly to the influence of environment....
It has been stated before that, according to all our experiences, the bodily traits which have been observed to
undergo a change under American environment belong to those characteristics of the human body which are
considered the most stable. We are therefore compelled to draw the conclusion that if these traits change under the
influence of environment, presumably none of the characteristics of the human types that come to America remain
stable. The adaptability of the immigrant seems to be very much greater than we had a right to suppose before our
investigations were instituted. As historians of anthropology have made clear, Boas well understood the political
implications of his results and was not at all reticent about using them to fight against immigration restrictions.
Boas presented these same findings, albeit in a greatly abbreviated form, in a paper delivered to the First Universal
Race Congress, held in London in 1911. The European Jewish immigrant figured prominently here as well: "Thus,
among the East European Jews the head of the European-born is shorter than the head of the American-born. It is
wider among the European-born than it is among the American-born. At the same time the American-born is taller."
Significantly, Boas did not sever the purported link between bodily form, and particularly head form, and mental or
moral characteristics or abilities. This link was central to racial anthropology and to racial science in general. A
good deal of the power of racial thought derived, of course, from this notion that nonphysical traits, or an
individual's internal life, could be deduced from external or physical traits. But Boas did argue that the instability or
plasticity of human type meant that one could expect a plasticity of mind and character as well. If environmental
forces worked to transform the physical, they would do the same for the mental and spiritual.
THE JEWISH POLITICS

OF JEWISH ASSIMILATION
This promotion of the ideas of a plasticity of (Jewish) mind and body and of integration as melioration was intended
primarily to shape debate on immigration and to counter nativist arguments made in the name of science. That is, it
can be understood first and foremost within the more limited context of American debates over national identity and
immigration. In Boas's case, for instance, the Jews were only one component in a broader, more inclusive analysis of
immigrant groups.51 Nonetheless, these studies also contributed, however obliquely, to the debate taking place
between Zionists and integrationists. Any exhortation of the benefits of assimilation was a repudiation of the
nationalist understanding of the collective fate of Jewry in the Diaspora.
"Those Jews" who believed in the purity of the Jewish race were indeed the same Jewish nationalists whose efforts
to leave Europe offered clear-cut proof of Jewish racial antagonism to Christian European culture. Fishberg
repudiated such avowedly political or ideological interpretations of contemporary Jewish life, even as he offered his
own ideologically charged analysis. Only science, he insisted, and not politics, could competently address and
answer pressing questions about Jewish racial identity and assimilation. Utilizing European and American
anthropological and medical statistical studies, he set out to prove that the Jews were not a "pure race" but, rather,
the product of centuries-long racial and ethnic mixing and that the etiology of "Jewish diseases" was social and
economic rather than racial. Hence for Fishberg the racial heterogeneity of the Jews allowed for the possibility and
probability of assimilation into non-Jewish environments.
In important respects, these assertions were not all that different from those made by Zionist social scientists. Like
the Zionists, Fishberg sought to undermine the image of the Jew as essentially deformed and diseased, and hence a
threat to the health of the nation, by adopting a strategy that granted the debilities and disabilities of Jews while at
the same time insisting that these deformities were a product of environment and, to a lesser extent, history. In a
1903 work entitled Health Problems of the Jewish Poor Fishberg called attention to the "small stature, the weak
chest, the fragile skeleton" of the eastern European Jew. But these were acquired traits, he insisted, and so not
necessarily passed on hereditarily. Like other Jewish social scientists who appropriated an environmental model to
explain physiological and anatomical traits, he explained ill-health in eastern European Jews by reference to the
external oppression imposed by the czarist regime and the internal oppression maintained by a Jewish religious
tradition at odds with modernity (although he also gave credence to the vitalizing effects of religious laws and
practices). In Russia the Jewish child was placed immediately into the cheder: "The unsanitary and unhygienic
surroundings of those schools are well known to everybody, and it is rather surprisingt hat any child is able to visit
them daily for several years and come out alive."
In the penultimate chapter of the book, entitled "Assimilation versus Zionism," Fishberg defined Jewish nationalism
as an ideological movement "born of negatives": the "rejection of emancipation" and fear of assimilation; the
adoption of "the chauvinistic ideas of [the Jews'] Christian neighbors" in order to "revive a racial and national
spirit"; and "apprehension for the future of Judaism." Zionists assert not merely that Jews are "a race," that is, that
Page | 42
there is more to collective Jewish identity than religion and history: "To the Zionists, the Jews are a distinct, nonEuropean race which has preserved itself in its original purity in spite of the Jews' wan-derings all over the globe.
They hold that the Jews can never merge with the European races, and are bound to remain distinct from their
Christian or Mohammedan neighbors."
This is the source of the Zionists' unwavering belief in the national identity and destiny of Jewry. Fishberg did not
do justice to the Zionist position, which was far more heterogeneous on the question of Jewish racial "purity." It
Page | 43
was, for instance, a belief in the lack of any demonstrable" racial antipathy" between Christians and Jews that led
many Zionist social scientists to identify intermarriage as the crucial problem facing modern Jewry. In their
warnings about dangerous levels of interracial mixture, they referred repeatedly to Rudolf Virchow's study of Jewish
and Christian German schoolchildren. In the early 1870s, at the behest of the newly constituted German
Anthropological Society, Virchow conducted a study of close to seven million children that measured the color of
the eyes, hair, and skin and the shape of the skull. The survey demonstrated, as George Mosse has written, that
"there was no such thing as a pure German or a pure Jewish race." Pure races, Virchow concluded, did not exist, and
science could not establish any clear and simple correlation between particular bodily features (color of hair or shape
of nose) and particular races. For Zionist social scientists, as for many non-Jewish authorities, statistics showing a
surprisingly high percentage of blond or "mixed type" German Jews were not a cause for rejoicing. While they could
take some comfort in the fact that such a study disproved the anti-Semitic claims of a physiological or instinctual
antipathy between Christian and Jew, it nonetheless made clear that the assimilation of Jewry-and hence the loss of
Jewish particularity (Eigentimlichkeit)- was proceeding apace.
For Fishberg, this sort of physical and social intermixture between Jews and surrounding peoples and races was
normal; the Jewish past and present both demonstrated that Jewry was a product of just such a phenomenon.
Moreover, Jewry-although not necessarily Judaism-was "healthiest" when it acted on these impulses. Isolation,
whether imposed by external regimes or by internal ideologies, was an "unnatural," abnormal condition. In the
nineteenth century European Jewry proved that "there is nothing within the Jew that keeps him back from
assimilating with his neighbors of other creeds; that as soon as the political and civil laws which previously kept him
apart from the general population are abrogated, he begins to adapt himself to the new surroundings in a wonderful
manner."
Jewish social science emerged in Europe and the United States in the first decades of this century for myriad
reasons. The Jews had been an object of research and debate within the general scientific community for decades.
Jewish social scientists perforce used the methods, ideas, and images of European science, even as they sought to
undermine significant elements within it. Anthropological, medical, and demographic studies of Jewry, produced by
Jews, were impelled by both apologetic and self-critical, reformist motives. A Jewish social science, it was believed,
might serve to counter the scientific anti-Semitism that had developed since the 1870s, even as Jewish experts
diagnosed the "ills" of their own people and prescribed cures. On the one hand, Jewish social scientists accepted
many of the negative images and ideas about the condition and characteristics of Jews and incorporated these into
their work. (One can, it ought to be noted, also find positive images of Jews here, and even assertions of Jewish
superiority-most notably the widespread belief in the higher developed intelligence of Jewry.) On the other hand, the
environmental determinism adopted by Jewish social scientists offered a foil to the biological determinism posited
by anti-Semites. But Jewish social science was ideologically driven in addition to being ideologically driven. If
Jewish scientists were united in their desire to appropriate the discourse that had traditionally evaluated their people
in a negative way and in their labor to reverse the condition of Jewry, they were divided over how, more precisely,
to interpret the social scientific data and what practical conclusions to draw from it.
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The Jews, ancient and modern, have always understood the science of eugenics,

You will never be able

eugenics and racial hygiene.

I do not know the origin of this name [Jews], but it is applied to

A Life (Un)Worthy of Living:

Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.

Eugenics and the Development of Nazi Race Policy

Eugenics and the Development of Nazi Race Policy.

There is no better argument for the universal practice of eugenics

There is no better argument for the universal practice of eugenics

Hitler's views are rather straightforward German social Darwinism

There is no better argument for the universal practice of eugenics

The Jews in Germany

Once the inferior races were exterminated, Hitler believed that

Between mothers, fetuses and society:

The Problem of Eugenics, Jewish Tradition and Zionism

Jewish Eugenics. John Glad

There is no better argument for the universal practice of eugenics

The Unfabricated History of Eugenics

Israels Uncomfortable History of Racist Engineering

There is no better argument for the universal practice of eugenics

There is no better argument for the universal practice of eugenics

eugenics and racial hygiene.

New Perspectives on Antisemitism

The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews.

Backdoor to Eugenics. Troy Duster.

Anglo-Jewish Scientists and the Science of Race

There is no better argument for the universal practice of eugenics

There is no better argument for the universal practice of eugenics

Meira Weiss, The Chosen Body

Christian Ingrao. Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine

The Wellborn science

Eugenics and the Jew

American Eugenics and the Nazis:

There is no better argument for the universal practice of eugenics

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Racial Science, Social Science, and the Politics of Jewish Assimilation

Racial Science, Social Science, and the Politics of Jewish Assimilation

There is no better argument for the universal practice of eugenics

Racial Science, Social Science,

THE JEWISH POLITICS

eugenics and racial hygiene.

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